jmacofearth’s posterous

[Thinking how to frame a dialogue without overburdening the writing with punctuation and he said then I said, I'm going to use one color for my statements and another color for my friend's statements. Hopefully that will make it easy to read quickly.]

On Saturday night a good friend asked, "So what do you do?"

He was somewhat serious. And it got worse from there.

"You are the only friend I can think of who I have not given work referrals to. If I were to sum up what you do in one sentence what would I say?"

I tried a few ideas on him.

I am a Social Media Strategist. "Nah, you've got people like Brian Solis, Chris Brogan and Jeremiah Owyang doing that gig."

I can build communities. "Really? To what effect? To make money? To save money?"

I know how to guide companies to... "No. What's a guide? What does that get them?"

I can assemble the creative and technical teams to do social media projects. "Oh really? Like what kind of projects?"

Launching a B 2 B portal or a B 2 C portal. "What's social about that?"

Okay, so I know how to do online marketing programs. "Boooring. You and the other 100 companies in Austin. What's your value?"

I have these training sessions to teach businesses how to work within the various aspects of social media. "Great. What do you call that?"

Uh, the sessions? That's not very good is it? Hmm... "Not too good. I can't get a handle on that. When I have a client and they need what you do I can say... JMac he's the <insert cool name here>. And make the recommendation and you get the work."

How about a Virtual Chief Social Media Officer? "That's great. That's it. That's what <name of local dude> does. That's his job. Yeah, that's good. Nobody else is doing that. A VCSMO!"

Now I just have to figure out how to tell that story and put the "value" in that proposition. And educate my friend and my potential clients on what a Social Media Officer does, virtual or full-time. So I'm building the DECK on it. Maybe I'll do the book, the podcast and the video presentation on it.

Here is the hero slide of my presentation What Is A Social Media Strategist. Once I get that nailed I can move on to showing the ROI on social media projects that I've been involved in and how that success can and will translate into similar success for YOUR COMPANY.

I will share the entire presentation when it is done. But until then here is my tenant of what I do, or what a Social Media Strategist does:

1. The social media strategist must assume many roles during the course of a given project.
2. The project often needs to be presented/sold/green-lighted by several levels within the spans and layers of a company.
3. Being a master of process and agile methodologies helps a lot in driving projects forward in these multi-team environments.
4. And finally the social media lead has to maintain a supportive attitude across all of the teams that come in contact with various parts of the project. Because one naysayer can ruin the entire program. And you never know where or when that negative leverage might rear it's ugly head.

It is a lot to navigate. And depending on the size of the company the leadership or lack of leadership can get quite complex. But that is the task of the social media strategist at any level. Stealthy and effective, the winning social media ninja can move projects through the darkness and opposition forces to achieve victory. Victory with or without the support of the entire cast of characters involved in the process, but victory (launch) nonetheless.

@jmacofearth (socialmedianinja.net)
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/socialmedianinja

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"The evolution of social media depends on the evolution of the browsing experience."

Open Source Collaboration is about Virtual Teams using web tools to manage and communicate asynchronously while still maintaining priorities and quality of communication. The first step on any new project (open or closed) is to define the goal. This post is only part of the challenge, but the goal of FFoFF has morphed into a process I refer to as The Cloud >> The View >> The App. And that process or workflow is the basis for a conversation I am intending to have with other simliar minded seekers.

The goal is not to create the next killer app, or uber browser, the goal is to define what that evolved web experience might look like. And then, using free plugins, apps and browsers (0riginally FFoFF or FriendFeed on FireFox) to get as close to the goal as possible. Through this discussion [preferably not a monologue] the intention is to articulate the needs and challenged of the next generation web experience.

The evolution of social media depends on the evolution of the browsing experience. Things like secure transactions anywhere, on-the-fly translated content, consolidated profile management (across all of your networked sites) and public and private personas are all part of the puzzle that will drive the next generation of social media connections and networks.

THE VIEW (an invitation to dialogue and collaborate to build the requirements and demo of the UBER UI for the "social web.")

1. The project
2. The tools
3. The rationale
4. The solutions
5. The view
6. The team
7. The genesis

1. The project

Defining the Evolved Browser or Uber App for Social Media

2. The tools

• FireFox 3 is the development platform and interface.
• The tools are widgets, social media sites, online apps, clouds of data and on and on.
• And FriendFeed is my current choice for uber aggregator of social content.

3. Rationale

• I believe we can iterate an Uber Interface (a VIEW) that will have amazing flexibility and require a ZERO DOLLAR dev budget.
• My Firefox bookmark bar is already a sort of streamlined UI. It is not good enough, and constantly changing and evolving. But it is FREE.

4. The Solution - Usage models for the solution.

• The uber social master VIEW
• BrainTraining and Teaching VIEW
• The newbie VIEW

5. The VIEW

A view is a design and grouping of FFoFF elements. A view is an iteration. A view is a proof and hypothesis.

6. The team

John McElhenney

7. The genesis

• First I posted a Question on LinkedIN. http://tinyurl.com/firefox-plugin-question
• Read a post by Steve Woodruff on his StickyFigure blog. And posted my comment to his One Interface to Rule Them All post. http://tinyurl.com/uber-search
• Next as I was contemplating Steve's question I was inspired to put together a PPT slide of what I imagined the uber app to be.
• Next, I created a room on FriendFeed http://tinyurl.com/globalsocialmedia
• Next, I built a feed of the GSMC room and invited most of my smart friends to join the room.
• Somewhere along the way, I read someone's post containing a reference to FFoFF as a joke. But in my mind it stuck.

Note: I am searching for that initial FFoFF person and will post the link here poste haste. And if it's you, please jump in and put yourself on the TEAM.

Also please see Socialwiki and Wikisocial for an evolution of this process to an open source directory project.

[Initial wiki page created 7-15-08]

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/theview-exploded

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-- This post is a response to Larry Hawes post: The Seven “C”s of Social Interaction --

Humor me for a sec, I'm going to think out loud for a sec...

Conversations - well this is the topic, so I'd cut it,
Continuum - like the word, I'm not clear what you mean.
Container - don't like the word, but okay on this one.
Community I think this is the topic, so I'd scratch this one.
Currency - "one person desires something that another has" [let's come back to this one in a sec]
Credibility - the biggie to me - I use the word TRUST
Connectivity - nice, multiple meanings [physical connection via internet; connection to another person via the conversation]

I'm going to take a shot at simplifying the "framework" if I can. Platform People Trust or at a start up I once labored at we rallied around the forumula to "make it scale": People Process Software In order to evaluate the power/value of a social interaction I think the focus is on the "connection." And when I think of major connection I think of looking in someone's eyes and evaluating what I call the "connect." [Nice how that fit together.]

Online of course, we will be interacting and trying to connect with folks we have never met and may never meet. At the heart of this tension is trust. The software/platform can help, a skype connection could help, but at the end of the day, even my "friend" will have to ask themselves, "what's in this for me?" I think that's our basic instinct. And certainly as things have tightened up financially, the "how does this impact the bottom line?" question is becoming more urgent.

So to summarize a simplified formula I would express it like this. People [multiplied by] Platform [divided by] each Individual's ability to express themselves during the connection [minus] Misses or clash of style that degrades the communication.

So a simplified social media equation might be written like this: P x P / I - M = T [trust ratio of a connection/community]

[Oh, hey, I've got to get out of here, I need to get some t-shirts printed with this new formula on them. I'll send you the link to the order form when I'm done.] So, Larry, thanks starting the dialogue. And if I get any money off these t-shirts I'm working on, I'll give you 9.7% of the profits after tax.

[based on the above formula and this interaction that we've just had]

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/socialmedia-formula

Now available at cost ($10.99) as a t-shirt from Cafe Press.

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