My son is 9. He invents new ways to augment the assault capabilities of his Nerf dart gun. This enterprise often involves trip wires and remote triggering mechanisms, as well as machine gun hide build-outs from his bunk bed ladder. Sometimes his ideas overshadow his ability to fashion a working prototype. He gets frustrated.

At least he was never shot down (forgive the pun) by the makers of his Nerf launcher. I’m not sure any number of “Edison didn’t always get it right the first time” speeches would fix the type of hurt like that levied on 8-year-old Harry Windsor, who sent an inspired crayon rendering of a new airplane design to Boeing Corporation, replete with firing capabilities.

Boeing responded with a form letter explaining why the company will not accept unsolicited design submissions. Windsor’s dad, a savvy new media-embracing ad man, responded the way the company should have – with a human touch, and a healthy dose of Twitter shame.

Boeing did acknowledge – through their own fledgling social media presence – that their human touch could itself use a little engineering.

Read the story from yesterday’s New York Times.

Is Twitter the cure for the common scrooge? What do you think?

The Detroit Free Press recently reported about the effect of social media tools on the marketing strategies of real estate sellers. Online networking tools entail a learning curve, and therefore a commitment of time and energy. And then there’s the manual labor of updating the listings on all those social media “outposts.”

Is that energy well spent? Yes, according to one profiled in the story: “There’s never too many sites,” she said. “There’s no overkill – the more exposure, the better.” Read that article HERE

Are you a broker or agent? Has social media revolutionized your marketing?

…and how you can too (and why you should)

When the phone calls and email don’t work, take it to twitter – a lot. Lather rinse repeat. Fan the company on Facebook and decorate their wall with your discontent. Wait for the phone to ring.

I’ll be getting my Weezer Snuggie in the mail in a couple of days absolutely fuh-ree.  Just what everyone needs in Florida in the summer – a blanket with sleeves.

OK, it’s a silly indulgence. It’s not a matter of life and death. But it was meant as a light-hearted gift for my Weezer-loving husband for Christmas. I received the message from the merchandising company the item was on backorder. I was given a reasonable timeframe for order fulfillment that would get the thing here by Christmas.

When that didn’t happen, I didn’t fret. Our anniversary was coming up. That came and went, then his birthday, then I ran out of occasions – and patience. Of course, during this time I made contact with the company.

I was told I could cancel the order. That pissed me off. So I took it to the streets, as they say.

The person handling their Twitter account feigned shock and horror at my predicament and promised a customer service representative would be in touch. Cue tumbleweeds.

I thought I’d wear them down with tweet frequency. This only seemed to bring down the signal to noise ratio, and the company tweeter didn’t reply anymore.

I don’t like to get nasty. I really don’t. But a consumer has to have a reasonable expectation their money is worth something to the company on the receiving end of it.

Snuggie be damned. This was about principle now.

So I did the thing that finally worked. I became a fan on their Facebook page. That’s right. A fan, although I couldn’t have been less than a fan. This gave me carte blanche to post anything my little heart desired all over their wall.

I said something like yeah, you’re a rock and roll shop. But you can’t expect your clientele to be so stoned they don’t recognized when they’re getting dicked around.

Long story short, a representative called me and explained about some problem with PayPal payments not going through on their backorders. I dunno. Sounds like it’s not really my concern. And it sounds like something they should have aware of months before and contacted me about it promptly.

What I do know is he offered to send my order immediately – and without cost. I couldn’t have been more thrilled than if Weezer had showed up on my front lawn for an afternoon jam. Well, maybe that’s a stretch. Truth was, I felt a mix of vindication and sheepishness. I was raised to be nice, and I shy away from confrontation. Don’t believe me? It’s true. But I also demand a certain respect as a consumer. And you should, too.

Companies: Do not let your relationship management get to the point where your customers try to talk others out of using your services. And with the instant-response mechanisms offered by social media at the hands of anyone competent enough to click a mouse, do not underestimate your customers’ complaint prowess.

Consumers: You’re in charge of the transaction. It’s your hard-earned money. I don’t care if it’s a blanket with sleeves or a Nick Cave doll. If you want it you want it, and you want it like, right now. Use the tools so easily at your disposal.

Just like Mia did:

Just like Dawn did:

Just like all these other people did. Are you paying attention, Sprint? Hmmm? Are you?

Have you brought your customer service issues to the Internet? We want details! In the comments, please.

OK, so this is only really the second in this occasional series. See Number 13: Forgiveness for the first. You’ll notice the irony in the sequence here in a moment.

Whoops, indeed!

I learned a lot from my dad. He built a successful business from scratch with a lot of hard work, long hours, and a boatload of invaluable assistance from my patient, T-crossing mom.  His business delivered a quality product, uncompromising after-sale service and an honest deal every time. However, he also had been blessed with an innate sense of marketing psychology. He bought a small pickup truck and had it stenciled with the company name. He then had the number 11 painted on the side.  He knew he needed his company to seem bigger, more-established, than it was.

Sprint could learn from him, too. Of course, they are a big company. A really big one. As such, they need to take extra care to look like they have their duckies in a row lest they find themselves in the midst of a colossal PR disaster. Like the one they find themselves in this week.

I’ve alluded before to the “the medium is the message” wisdom that’s ingrained into every aspiring advertising writer. If you want to look like a professional company, your advertising medium can’t be tacky, poorly executed, cluttered or insult the reader. Shouldn’t that be the case with the company’s product?

Sprint is a communications company. Their corporate communications platforms should embody a commitment to service, quality and – one would think – uptime.

Since Sunday, it seems, Sprint’s Web site has been down while their IT department busily toils away at an update  ostensibly designed to improve customer service and communication. It’s now Wednesday morning. And the site is STILL DOWN.

I had a little temper tantrum, and tweeted two messages in a row expressing my disdain. The reason I knew about the outage is I received a payment due notice by email. Evidently, collections activity at the company is functioning without a glitch. And I understand a Web outpost has been erected to facilitate new customer sales.

However, my favored method of payment is not working. Do you think Sprint will mind if I wait until their site is up and running and I can take care of the small matter of the fee? Of course, I can always call. However, actually calling Sprint, and talking to one of those associates after navigating the phone queue – well, have you read any Dante?

After years of working his business, my dad eventually didn’t need to try to look bigger, because he was – and on his own merits. Sprint could try to act a little smaller in this case.  Such huberis, Sprint, to not care for every detail of your update and effectively alienate your established customer base!

By the way, my third tweet was an invitation to other cell phone companies that could craft a comparable service plan and buy out the Sprint contract. We’ll see what comes of it. If nothing else, social media offers a therapeutic opportunity to complain about being stepped on by the big guys. I don’t know if the big guys are listening to the little guys – but they should.

Got some spleen of your own to vent? I invite you to do so in the comments. Enjoy!

13 is just a random number, of course. Well, maybe not so random, triskaidekamaniac that I am. However, as we reach a point where social media is a household term, and we’ve gotten a little bit past all the talk of adoption and more into talk about best practices it’s worthwhile to take into account all the little things it does for us.

How many of you have received a friend request from someone you had all but written off? Did you feel more than a little surprised? Did you experience an emotional churning as you faced all the feelings that person made you feel in the first place? Maybe you felt inconvenienced this person forced you to revisit those feelings. If you didn’t reject the request in a knee-jerk reaction, maybe you let the request sit in your inbox for a few days or a few months.

Then, after you slept on it, what did you decide? If you accepted the request, maybe you had the chance to talk rationally with your new-old friend and smooth out old hurts. What did you feel then? Relief? Release? Maybe you didn’t realize what a hold that person still had over you until you were faced with them again.

I’ve had this very experience several times during my foray into social networking. For me, there are different stages, similar to the stages of grief – with all due respect to Dr. Kübler-Ross, of course. From denial to acceptance. And isn’t that what forgiveness is, in the first place? A kind of petit mort where those things that bind us to the past are swept away.

If social media use helps us achieve that, I’d call it pretty handy dandy. How has it helped you come to grips with the past?

Social Networks are revolutionizing how we view our world. People are connecting, businesses are being created or transformed, and the world seems like a smaller place. As with any transformation on a grand scale, a plethora of consultants, gurus, blogs, and how-to books have risen to meet the demand for information about the social revolution.

However, it is very rare to hear anything about the underlying forces that actually drive the social network phenomenon.

It’s a shame because the story is a great one that has implications, not only for social media, but for fields as diverse as counter-terrorism, ecology, economics, organizational theory and cancer research. Network Theory has fundamentally changed our understanding about how the world works since its inception a decade ago. Most of all, by understanding how networks form and grow, we can build better ones.

Fireflies and the President of the United States

Our story begins in 1996 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where an adventurous rock climber and former Australian Navy Officer named, Duncan Watts, was thinking about how crickets, frogs, fireflies, and pacemaker cells all seem to be able to synchronize their behavior within large groups.

His mind must have began to wander because he suddenly remembered that his father once told him that everybody is just six relationships away from the President of the United States. The concept had existed in literature early in the 20th century and was documented in Stanley Milgram’s famous “Small World Experiment”.

In a flash of inspiration he went to his PhD thesis advisor, Steven Strogatz, and told him that he wanted to, yet again, change his thesis topic. Watts had a hunch that both phenomena might be related. Strogatz, somewhat used to giving his brilliant student leeway, consented.

The Strength of Weak Ties

As he began his research, Watts came across a highly cited paper written by Mark Granovetter called “The Strength of Weak Ties” about how people find jobs. He found that most people don’t locate employment through their friends, but through friends of friends.

Granovetter dubbed these relationships “weak ties” (after the attraction between water molecules that give the liquid many of its properties). Granovetter surmised that it is through weak ties that information is largely distributed. While we can maintain relationships with relatively few people, the people they know greatly increase our access to facts, knowledge and wisdom.

We have friends from work, school, our neighborhood, etc. While our ties may be strong ties to us, they are weak ties to our friends from separate clusters. For instance, the felon in our neighborhood can be connected to the law professor at our university in only two steps!

Spacemen vs. Cavemen

Watts also began thinking about his youthful love of science fiction and two Isaac Asimov novels in particular; one about spacemen and another about cavemen. The spacemen communicated remotely so that the people they knew didn’t know each other, while the cavemen lived in isolated groups and knew everybody their friends knew. He decided to build a mathematical model that would describe both situations and every possibility in between.

In addition to the “degrees of separation” metric (the average number of links it takes to get from one network member to another), Watts also created a “cluster coefficient,” in effect how tightly clustered communities are within the network.

A good analogy is a school lunchroom. How many people who have close relationships would be calculated by the cluster coefficient while how many introductions one would need, on average, to get to any particular person, would be the degrees of separation (or more technically, path length). This type of calculation has been second nature for poor note-takers and class-cutters alike for ages.

Armed with mathematical representations for both his “spacemen and his “cavemen” he could experiment with different types of networks.

Small World Networks

What he found was startling. In his model, as communities connect to each other, the social distance between people increases – up to a point – and then immediately comes crashing down. It turns out that it takes just a little bit of mixing for the social distance to decrease by an enormous amount, but a lot of mixing to kill communities. Although surprising, the pattern was familiar. Similar “instantaneous phase transitions” have been long known in Physics.

Moreover, he found that in almost all cases, the same result appeared, it was only a matter of time for a network under fairly normal conditions to reach the optimal state. Globally connected networks with strong local cohesion are not only possible, they are the equilibrium case – you just needed a relatively small number of Granovetter’s “weak ties” mixed in to make the whole thing work.

He called the result a “Small World Network” after Milgram’s famous experiment.

Hey! Networks Grow, Don’t They?

Watts published a paper on his findings with Strogatz and it became an immediate success, widely read and cited throughout the scientific community. At Notre Dame University, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and his student, Réka Albert, noticed an oversight – networks grow over time and large communities within networks drive the growth. They quickly published their own paper.

What they found was that networks follow a very specific mathematical rule called a “power law” that described well known phenomena such as the “80/20 rule” and Chris Andersen’s now famous long tail. Their findings suggested that even very large networks were driven by relatively few “hubs” around which everything else was organized.

The two teams continued to trade papers back and forth and in a very short time Network Theory had arrived!

Implications of Network Theory for Social Media

Through understanding the forces that drive social networks, we can take some practical steps to improve Social Media performance.

Communities are primary: A network is only as strong as the communities that it contains. A big mistake that many Social Media efforts make is to pursue broad coverage early on. Building enthusiastic, devoted communities requires a local approach (either geographically or in social space). Those local communities have “weak ties” to other communities in other places, even faraway places. So you really can think globally by acting locally.

People want to connect: Connections between communities naturally grow over time for the same reasons that information wants to be free and dictatorships are expensive to maintain. Any opportunity to implement open architecture (while maintaining security protocols for the site core) should be seized upon. Walling off a social network is choosing the path to obscurity (although hardly the one less traveled).

Large clusters drive the network: A small number of extremely active members drive network growth. Mostly, they are driven by reputation and attention so it is crucial to give users every opportunity to be recognized by their peers.

Social Media isn’t successful… until it is: A network doesn’t grow in a linear fashion and it doesn’t grow in just one direction, but two: outward and inward. Watts described a network maturing as an “instantaneous phase transition” similar to a crystal forming. The process moves relatively slowly and then, suddenly, a new global state is achieved. Once a “Small World Network” has formed, the growth becomes exponential.

Social Networks on the web can be extremely powerful. Once you understand the forces that drive them, you can make their horsepower work with you and not against you.

Greg’s Note: For those of you who are interested in learning more, Watts and Barabasi have both published highly readable and informative accounts of their Network Theory adventure and the friendly rivalry. It’s a lot of fun to read both sides and learn both about their triumphs and their frustration when the other one uncovered something which seemed fairly obvious in retrospect. Besides being brilliant both write well and in friendly and engaging styles. In fact, the books are much more accessible than journalist accounts of the same events.

The titles are “Six Degrees” (Watts) and “Linked” (Barabasi). Steven Strogatz has also published a great book called “Sync” that covers pre-cursor work to Network Theory. All are refreshing counterpoints to “guru books” and offer true insight and wisdom.

This whole social media thing is kinda crazy. I did it before I knew what it was. Years ago, I was at an open mic event in downtown Fort Myers in a hookah bar with cushions all over the floor. The emcee, now a good friend of mine, made an announcement asking for participants’ email addresses and MySpace usernames. It was the first time I heard about MySpace. I went home and tried it out. I spent far too much time. It was silly. But the most important thing is I was turned on to this easy and dynamic way to get in touch with people.

Driven to distraction

Later, I became amazed at how many people came out of the woodwork through social media platforms. Friends I had written off “friended” me on Facebook, and kind of brought me home to a place I had run away from. Suddenly, people I thought had moved in and out of my life showed they were there all along.

So at this point, I’m starting to see the power in all this stuff. I used it with some good success to build name recognition for my husband’s business. We showed up for TweetUps, where we built a great new community of friends and business contacts around us. We got involved with Social Media Club Southwest Florida and an awesome fundraiser called Twestival, which raised a couple thousand for Pace Center for Girls. I dabbled in affiliate marketing. I got an important job offer…

I got results. However, “getting out there” has also been a bit of a distraction – I suffered a traumatic life event about five years ago that turned into a sustained process that still hasn’t been resolved. A psychologist even told me, “You’re like a soldier who’s returned from war.” My online life has been a chance to show a brave face. But now I’ve found another way that “getting out there” can bring me back to myself.

A breadcrumb trail

The first friend I made in Fort Myers more than eight years ago (at one of those open mic events) is a brilliant poet and a beautiful person. Today I found out about this thing he’s doing at EditRed. He calls himself the Suicide Kid and he uses a mug shot for his profile photo, but it’s a front (sorry, Ryun, but you know it’s true).

It made me realize – I’ve been doing this social media thing, and to a great extent, leaving my passions out of it. So I followed my friend’s lead, and signed up for an account at that writer’s networking site. I did a search for others of that type and came across Read Write Poem And I felt a weight lifting.

I’ve had a few poems published in a few different places. Two can be found online at Nthposition, an online literary magazine out of the UK. But that was between 2005 and 2007 and I haven’t done much with my work since then. Now that I know I can read Ryun’s work whenever I want to, I’m also inspired to post some of my work, get it “out there.”

Inertia can be a real presence in my life. The community and accountability offered by these writer’s sites offer me an opportunity to convert that inertia into the “in motion” kind, instead of the alternative.

Have you found an online network that serves as a channel for your passions? Has “getting out there” provided a way to bring you back to yourself?

By the way, Ryun’s got this book he’d like to publish. If you know anyone in the biz…well, you know how to find me.

I put up a blog post (almost) every day, and sometimes, I put up more than one a day. On top of this, I write for clients, write for other projects, work on books, and other things. Some of you don’t have all these other writing commitments, but still want some ideas on getting more writing out the door. Here are some thoughts into my process that I hope will give you a framework for writing a blog post (almost) every day.

How to Blog Almost Every Day

1. Read something new every day. Need a starting point? Try Alltop. (Hint: read something outside your particular circle to get new thoughts).
2. Talk with people every day. I get many of my topic ideas from questions people pose to me, or through conversations.
3. Write down titles and topic ideas in a notepad file. ( I’ve given you 100 blog topics and another 20 blog topics just to get started.)
4. Maintain a healthy bookmarking and revisiting habit. I use Delicious.com
5. Find 20-40 minutes in every day to sit still and type.
6. Follow an easy framework. Here are 27 blogging secrets to start you on what I mean.
7. Get the post up fast, not perfect. You can edit if you have to, later. Perfectionism kills good habits.
8. Dissect other people’s posts to understand what makes them tick. The more you understand of HOW they write, the more you can take the best parts of it into how you write. (hint, my 27 blogging secrets post gives you my patterns.)
9. Find useful and interesting pictures. I use Flickr photos licensed under Creative commons for most of my photos. This helps me sometimes get a great photo for a post I already have in mind, but it also gives me post material sometimes.
10. Think about what your customers and prospects need. I write from the perspective of the communities I serve. Every post is aimed at something I believe will be helpful to my community in some form or another. This focus takes some weight off my worries about what I should write about or not. I write about what my community needs.
11. Mix things up by sometimes blogging on paper first.
12. Mix things up by writing guest posts for sites that aren’t like yours. This gives your mind new formats to think about. I did this recently as part of a project and I loved it.
13. Mix things up by changing the lengths of your posts: some long, some brief. Learn what makes an impact how.
14. Never worry about throwing up the occasional “best of” post, once you get enough material. Example: here’s My best advice about blogging.

It’s not easy, but once you develop the habits, they stick with you. I’m writing quite regularly now, but it took me several years to get my groove down to a science. Some days, it’s still thrown off. Busy schedules can get the best of us, no matter what. That said, try to keep some content “in the can,” so that you’re rarely at a loss to keep your audience happy.

What do you think? Any other ideas to add?

Evan Slusher, operations for charity:water; Chris Brogan; and your social media concierge at TwestivalSWFL to benefit Pace Center for Girls. Photo courtesy Chris Griffith @Twitterzilla.

You would think at this point that we’d be up to curiosity or even playful experimentation.

That’s only a start. Another course is to engage with consumers where they want to be reached. When the surveyed companies state that their goals of using social media are: to increase engagement, build brand loyalty, and spur word of mouth. If that’s the case, you don’t get there by (a) ignoring where the rest of the world is going; or (b) burying your head in the sand in terms of these sites.

The good news is that half of the suggested activities/sites mentioned in the survey (Facebook page, Twitter, customer reviews, blogs and viral [sic] videos) are already accepted or used by more than half of the respondents. That’s a great start, but there’s more potential.

For decades, companies have defined the channels their customers must use to contact them. But phrases like, “We are available by phone weekdays from 9am until 4pm Eastern Standard Time,” and “We will attempt to answer the emails we receive within 48 hours, but times vary based on incoming volume” are quickly becoming a thing of the past. The long-held notion that companies control the conversation is being challenged by social media.

In a world where any customer can, in seconds, tweet or post to Facebook a pithy product review or share an experience they had with a brand, companies are forced to entirely rethink how they interact with their customers. Step one, probably the hardest step, is realizing they are no longer in control. The power of social media has empowered the consumer to reach literally hundreds or thousands of people in seconds. And because we know a consumer’s closest friends are three to five times more likely to share the same preferences for products and brands, this newfound power is not to be underestimated.

Sure, companies have Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. Yes, a few thousand companies are already searching Twitter for mentions and engaging customers. This is only a start. The real transformation happens when the companies let go of the conversation and instead work to nurture it. The brands who offer tools to their customers to increase the amount of conversation and encourage their customers to discuss the pros and cons of their products will be the winners who emerge from this disruptive time.

Companies like Get Satisfaction and UserVoice offer tools that change the balance of power between a company and its customers. Get Satisfaction has a fantastic manifesto, or “Company-Customer Pact,” which defines a new relationship between a brand and its customers, encouraging public dialog, warts and all, but expecting productive discussion in return for the company’s helpful engagement.

While product forums from companies like Jive Software have been around for many years, I believe public conversations about brands will now be distributed in nature, spread across the web into thousands of tiny corners. The challenge for companies is figuring out how to manage this. A conversation could start with a tweet, be directed to a help forum, be responded to in email, updated in a blog post, and then broadcast on Facebook. How will this be tracked, measured and monitored? This market is ripe with opportunity for both brands and software platforms built to nurture the distributed web-wide conversation. And brands who support a public dialog will engender more respect from their customers than those who turn a blind eye to it–or worse, try to shut it down. Ultimately, companies become more customer-centric from this disruption. I am sure United Airlines wishes they had just paid for the passenger’s guitar they broke now that the music video he recorded chronicling the ordeal spread virally and has been viewed more than five million times!

The company/customer relationship is but one relationship forever changed by social media. Similar transformations are happening between companies and their employees and companies and their vendors. New companies and tools will emerge to address these situations. At Venrock, we are looking for the entrepreneurs that are pioneering this space and embracing this opportunity.