Being Peter Kim

Feeling Irish today?

2010-03-17T03:17:00-04:00

Taken at St. James Gate.

Being there

2010-03-09T08:42:28-05:00

As data networks facilitate higher speed connections, remote experiences have become richer. Later this month, college basketball fans can watch March Madness live at their desks instead of having to constantly refresh a scoreboard page or linger in the break room where CNBC has been anonymously switched to CBS.

But for me I'll always remember sitting in the nosebleeds at the Georgia Dome, cheering for teams to which I had no connection.

These days, scholars study Woodstock as a cultural phenomenon. Amazon has almost 300 history books on the three day weekend. Taping culture was propagated by fans of the Grateful Dead, Phish, Dave Matthews Band and others, who shared experiences with one another. Pay-per-view allows us to stream HD concerts into our homes.

But for me, I'll always remember being close enough to see the texture of Eddie Vedder's jacket at Riverbend, the long drives home from Rupp Arena with ears ringing from arena rock, not being crushed in a mosh pit at FDR Park.

Think about industry conferences and events - we used to read the trade press for recaps on large convocations; then we had blog posts, evolving into liveblogging, and today there's real-time tweets and Ustreaming citizen journalists.

But this exponentially increased flow of information does not replace the value of in-person, real-life experiences. There's an old proverb that states, "teach a person to fish and they're fed for a lifetime." It's about process - and through process one gains experience.

I'm heading down to Austin for the Dachis Group Social Business Summit and SXSW. If you're going to be in town as well, I look forward to being there with you. Because despite advertisers, pundits, and others who may believe that technology creates no gap between real and Memorex - the ones who are there will feel the difference.

You can follow live updates from the Dachis Group Social Business Summit at #sbs2010.

Apps: the new widgets

2010-03-02T09:02:00-05:00

Remember widgets? In the early days of corporate social media (i.e. 2005 - 2006), widgets were all the rage. They were light and viral; the minimal effort to support them post-lauch made them more attractive to brands than blogs or podcasts.

Fast forward a couple years and I was speaking with Bob Garfield of Ad Age about widgets. This is the piece of mind that I gave him about widgets, which he published in the weekly and I think in his book:

"When you can combine utility with the purpose of your brand, that's the opposite of why people hate marketing. Instead of fooling them with the old brand-marketing song and dance, it's not a promise; it's a reality: 'This is what the traffic is like. This is what the weather is. This is what the stock market is right now."

Fast forward another couple years and I'm listening to Tim Duggan of Mercury Girl speaking about mobile applications. Suddenly everything old is new again; the factors that will make brands' mobile applications successful are the same principles that made a good old widget: utility, functionality, value.

If you've been trying to figure out how to think about the new world of applications, look back at your resources on widgets and run a find-and-replace...it might get you up to speed sooner than you imagined.

What happened to liveblogging?

2010-02-24T10:27:13-05:00

We're Blogging This! on Flickr via Beth77

I spoke at a conference earlier this morning in Dublin, The Digital Festival. I'm still here and listening to the other presentations, Shel Israel earlier and Russell Davies now. These guys have interesting ideas and presentation styles.

And then it hits me - at a different point in social media history, I'd be liveblogging notes from these sessions. Today, there's no need for this as the technology has evolved and various attendees are taking notes on Twitter hashtagged #BFS10.

So what happened to liveblogging?

Probably a lot of things: new publishing tools (e.g. Twitter, Posterous, Tumblr), attention fragmentation, and value retention (e.g. reserving analysis for private application), among others. Wasn't live blogging always just a replacement for rich media experience (i.e. video) anyway?

I don't believe that blogging is "dead" but the act of liveblogging certainly seems to be.

What you can learn from Forrester's new blogging policy

2010-02-09T09:02:00-05:00

I've been following the discussion around Forrester's new blogging policy. In case you weren't aware, I was formerly a Forrester analyst covering social computing and wrote some of the early drafts of the company's blogging policy. Now I'm building a strategy consulting practice at Dachis Group and advising companies on social business - wherein policies and guidelines play an important role.

Based on my experience, I understand where Forrester's management is coming from. Forrester makes their money by curating information and social media poses a threat to its core intellectual property. How? By shifting points of value creation and capture closer to $free. So why on earth would the firm want to encourage their proprietary value-creating assets (i.e. analysts) to support and accelerate the shift? Implementing a policy to protect IP value is a smart move by management.

However, smart marketers know that not all consumers are created equal. Same goes for Forrester's readers: some prefer syndicated research reports, others phone inquiries, and some favor in-person interactions. Professionally-affiliated, personally-managed blogs - let's call them "perfessional" - provide an additional engagement channel for employees to support business goals, on consumer-friendly terms. Social media policies must provide flexibility from an employee perspective that permit perfessional engagement - otherwise, companies risk missing a business opportunity.

Here's where Forrester's decision appears to fall flat: in its quest for control of employee social media publishing, the company limits both risk AND reward. This is the point that most social media discussion has focused on. Ultimately it's a business decision and Forrester's to make, but case history shows that perfessional blogs like Jeremiah's, Bruce's, and mine help build both personal and company brands.

I think there's a more difficult point here for Forrester - some condition in the company's current culture drove an insider to leak the information to SageCircle. This signals internal dissonance and the uncomfortable but likely fact that malcontent employees need to separate from Forrester. When you're playing poker, exchanging your cards as the round plays out is just part of the game. Only time will tell if the new policy is a success or failure, based on business results - but again, a smart move by management to protect core IP in the reality of an evolving social business landscape, instead of clinging to purist social media ideals.

Companies must implement policy to manage social media participation and let's face it - the devil is in the details. To be effective, a social media policy must be tailored to a company's strategy, culture, process, style, industry, competition, technology, and most importantly - customer needs. You can't just copy and paste a policy you find on a wiki; you've got to understand how policy and guidelines play critical roles in supporting social business.