Moderator: Steve Sieck, President, SKS Advisors, Inc.
Panelists:
Bob Carrigan, CEO, IDG Communications, Inc.
David Mather, President, Hoover's
Michael Dunn, VP , Hearst Interactive Media
Clara Shih, AppExchange Product Line Manager, Salesforce.com

[Technical difficulties at the beginning at this panel, apologies to early speakers]
Steve framed the discussion by referring to his research for the SIIA showing the gap between social media's payback versus focus.
Steve: Why focus on social media?

Carrigan: Have to focus on it, need more editorial impressionsy
Dunn: Focus on it intensely
Mather: Provide tools to make more actionable informaiton, how to give value when you're entering into conversations in your professional activities. Hoover's Connect, purchased technology from VisiblePath
Shih: AppExchange investment but also online community IdeaExchange, Salesforce to Salesforce, entity nodes can be your sales partners, exchange information. FaceForce integration, pull up contact info but also Facebook profile information real-time into SFDC.
Carrigan: TheHub, generates thousands of visits and page views, all comments from users, very high monetization. Direct advertising benefits.
Dunn: Small teams can do a lot, low-cost efforts can yield high benefits with a lot of feedback from the community.
Mather: People want to be tethered to their workflow, were making so many changes to incorporate privacy that they needed absolute control over platform to manage these issues.
Shih: Keeps people from having to log into multiple sites, keeps them productive.

Steve: Social media communities don't happen by themselves, what do you need to do?

Carrigan: Don't hold on too much, can't be too regulated. Didn't hire a community manager initially, hired a CIO. Need to put in people that community members will relate to.
Dunn: On the boards of several companies, including Internet Capital Group, if you're considering moving into social media technologies first you should be getting on B2C networks, people want to interact constantly. Lots of evil things out there but that's an educational issue. Facebook is a good platform, Twitter good group chat, Seesmic is video chat in alpha. Lots of people involved in these sites, bring this back into your work environment.
Mather: Once people have the sense that it's a secure environment they play a little bit and start to get confidence. People begin to tap into your own organization's knowledge network for business-like goals. People will use it in the right context.
Shih: Trust is key, openness also, engagement. The content and services have to provide ongoing value, or they won't log in again.

Steve: Google OpenSocial, implications?
Shih: A set of open standards that publishers can use to build applications on social networking platforms, implementers can implement once and have data shared on many sites, remains to be seen whether people will go for it and whether publishers will be implementing it on their end.
Mather: As a publisher of insight, need to provide a 360 view of the world, if you are learning about a person you may want to know that Hoover's says versus LinkedIn versus MySpace. Standards can help us to unleash the power of these platforms.
Carrigan: From a user point of view there's OpenID, too many logins for social media, OpenID can help.
Dunn: Blogosphere is the largest social network today, you control the data, you're responsible for comments and trackbacks. In a Facebook environment you can't eliminate yourself and put it elsewhere, that's a challenge, data portability can address that. Every environment requires a profile, redundant, quite a bit of fragmentation, everyone has a little different feature set, everyone should have an about page, not worry about companies managing that.
Shih: Standardization is good, but sometimes profiles need to be separate, what if you're a musician on the weekends and want a separate identity.
Mather: Standards are good, but need to be careful about having too many controls.

Steve: 99 percent of SM applications are amusement oriented so far, what are some of the business widgets that may turn out to be killer apps.

Carrigan: We're working on lots of widgets, now career widgets, content related to career events, review widgets, looking at many cool business widgets.

Question: To what extent are lawyers getting involved on specific terms for social media.
Dunn: On same floor as lawyers, go to lunch with them, get advised on absolutely everything that we do. Launched a magazine completely in a blog format, lawyers help a lot.
Mather: Attorneys needed for Web tool world, how reliable are we when a blogger that says something in detriment to another company, they want us to filter everything, but hard to do in a community environment. Lots of rules in place, but sometimes we have to push the envelope.

Question: Looking at demographics, are there are demographics that resonate most? Tech or other industry?
Carrigan: Skews to younger audience, try to get the same quality, don't qualify as much as we do for print format.
Shih: Two phenomena, grown from Silicon Valley, which is young, but the audience is aging, as college students. mature they become the business consumers of the next generation.
Dunn: If your B2B footprint is global, social media can help you to break down social and time barriers. China is a bit rougher, tech community is an early adopter.
Mather: Much older audience than typical internet company, C-Level exec at D&B, do you know anyone, not a Silicon Valley type, intuitively jumped to use the tool.

Question: ROI?
Shih: Can calculate spend for partners, can close the data when deal is done, SFDC needs to do that to maximize value.
Carrigan: Journey of buying behavior, score provided to marketers in reporting, so if signed up for a program they can see that not all of the leads are created equally, new program. Market Fusion site.
Mather: Hoover's Connect is a free network, ROI in value of relationships, can manage private networks and provide economic benefit. Add value, make product actionable.

QUICK TAKE: Excellent panel, I thought that it was a great mix of core B2B people, representing publishers, enterprise platforms and new models that are spanning the world outside of and inside of the corporate firewall. Clearly it's very early days for social media in B2B, many of these initiatives have emerged fully only in the past few months. But the trend is to empower people in business to harvest value from their core professional relationships as well as to pull in their more multidimensional selves from social media online portals to help relationships become deeper more quickly and more effectively. The next generation of applications is likely to start mining social media content more effectively to provide alerts, trends, behaviors and other key indicators that can effect both relationships and transactions. If there's anything that can refute the question of social media's value it's what's happening in business.

Labels: business information, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2008, social media

Andrew's view of the Internet and the media was changed by writing his book The Cult of the Amateur, still in favor of authority, likes standing on a podium above the crowd, this isn't the Internet.

Was a mid-90's Internet entrepreneur after being a music journalist, classic old-fashioned writers, paid them a lot of money to write about jazz and classical music, but were right in the middle of the Web action. Was greedy, founded his own company, was exciting then for media people to put high-quality content on the Web quickly and efficiently. Wasn't disintermediation of existing outlets or empowering individuals, was exciting to distribute as an entrepreneur. VideoCafe failed, but remained an evangelist, continued to drink the Kool-Aid. In 2004, in Sebastapol north of San Francisco, Tim O'Reilly was the leading evangelist of Web 2.0, "FooCamp," Friends of O'Reilly, FooCamp is an unconference, no heirarchy, no formal structure, everyone spends the weekend with sleeping bags and a vision of a new world. Represented a sneak preview of Web 2.0 anarchy. Went from being a digital believer to a digital skeptic.

We weren't just talking about the new media, we were the new media, everyone was simultaneously broadcasting themselves but nobody was listening. Digital Darwinism was dawning, no authority, everyone talking simultaneously. First book to attack Web 2.0, not a professional journalist, professional journalists say they're glad to hear it. Author wanted the subtitle "How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture," he doesn't think it now. But the more user-generated content there is, the less they read a paper and go to the movies. People invest less in high-quality and professional content. MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia replacing high-quality professional content.

But the Internet can't kill anything, the Internet is not a person, doesn't have a mind of its own, it's just technology. Not surprising that you get a countercultural movement out of San Francisco via this technology, was an outgrowth of 1970s culture. More people think that they have something to say, it's an authority issue. It's a premonition of something more profound, the people are rising up, they want to be the author, they want to be the source, you can't blame the Internet for that, it was already in place, the Web simply unleashed it. Now traditional media has to cope with the rising of the people. Left and right bash The New York Times, it's actually the 1960s 2.0.

Put myself in the most dystopian mood possible, future could be both "Brave New World" and "1984". I think that I was wrong to be deeply dystopian, but it's just a moment, a moment that will pass away. People are already bored with this stuff, the Lessigs and other crazy people in Silicon Valley still talk but most people are realizing the dangers in user-generated content. People are coming to their senses, entrepreneurs are coming to their senses also. The Web 2.0 revolution has ended in Silicon Valley, met Jason Calacanis, he expressed same sentiment, said that Web 2.0 wasn't going anywhere, can't monetize, too much content with dark forces behind it, he founded Mahalo, a curated search engine, employees are real people putting good content into search engines. You need hierarchy, you need authority. Citizendium takes on Wikipedia, e.g.

The new, new thing is professionalism, no value economically in amateur content, it's a scam, Facebook's a scam, 15 billion valuation is a scam, this year is the year of the professional, the year in which authority will make a comeback. Don't get swept up by the Silicon Valley garbage, when the Lessigs come argue back. The probem in this country is that authority is afraid of the people's revolution. Professional media needs to unapologetically take charge. Colbert said he is an elitist, he said yeah. Without that media we're in the deepest s**t imaginable. Things may not be as bad as they may seem. Need to fight anonymity, the ability for old to become young, to deny our physicality.
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QUICK TAKE: Well...where to begin. I agree that the ability to curate user-generated content is a key growth area this year, but it's clear that user-generated content is becoming authoritative in more ways than we can imagine. Professional authors need to come to terms with this more deeply. The ability of content to collect an affirming and trusted community is as important in many instances as the ability for people in an hierarchical structure to declare content to be authoritative. Social media underscores the need for authority to flow from people who have to live with the consequences of authority - democracy, in other words. Democracies have designated, trusted representatives, administrators and leaders, and this will continue, but inherently it's the market's responsibility to seek out its own view of what is authoritative content if we are to have the efficiences to cope and thrive in a rapidly changing global economy. More at Content Nation and in my upcoming book. I am not saying that Andrew's view is all tosh, but I do find it interesting that he sidestepped all of the highly positive, high-quality and monetizable initiatives that publishers have taken on in social media. It's an appealing position for traditionalists, but the money is not in the traditionalists' models any more. They need to redeploy their editorial staffs to manage quality user-generated content more effectively.

Labels: books, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2008, social media