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In an imaginative post on Social Media Today, entrepreneur Jay Deragon asks a daring question.
Are online communes replacing online communities?
"Haven’t you noticed," Deragon writes, "that your real network is actually becoming smaller, regardless of how many followers and friends you think you have?”
Your followers and friends are catching on.
Goodbye community.
Hello commune.
Although the darlings of every new-media maven, online communities leave a lot to be desired. They're large, loose and transaction-oriented (often to the financial betterment of their facilitators).
By virtue of these qualities, online communities make it "impossible to hold true relational affinities."
Online communes, on the other hand, are small, tight and focused on the common interests of their members. They represent "a natural migration of human dynamics, where the membership is designed to have a higher degree of connectivity."
Because they only bring people together in order to fleece them, communities are old school. Deargon cites Internet guru Clay Shirky: “The problems of the past are being leveraged by organizations which have created solutions that preserve the old problems.“
Bazaarvoice surveyed 175 chief marketing officers in late 2010 and discovered they're measuring social media by a new yardstick.
The survey shows that CMOs still put the greatest faith in two hard measures, sales and revenue.
They also put faith in measures like site traffic, number of fans and number of customer comments.
However, a whopping 93% of CMOs now plan to use "customer-generated content" when arriving at new-product decisions.
The preferred forms of customer-generated content are customer stories, product ideas, polls and customer reviews.
"CMOs have moved beyond fear and skepticism to embrace social media as the source for strategic intelligence that can transform their products, brands and business," says Erin Mulligan Nelson, Bazaarvoice's own CMO.
The survey also found that more than half of CMOs currently don't see any ROI from three of the most popular social media tools, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Traditionalists complain that Americans' addiction to "content snacking" signals the death of long-form communication.
But content snacking only means marketers must embrace "lateral media distribution," says PR consultant Angelo Fernando in the current edition of IABC's CW Magazine.
While many Americans still crave the long form, their preference for content snacks presents a tasty opportunity to deliver stories in new and interesting ways.
"Instead of treating each medium as a source of a complete message, we can now treat different media channels as being tethered together, letting a message hop across from one to the other, laterally," Fernando writes.
When the most popular interfaces are smartphones, iPads and e-book readers, inspiring audiences demands a whole new way of thinking about your content.
How are you delivering your story?
A friend of mine, Dan Bailes, has launched The Vision Thing, a blog devoted to "innovation, creativity and vision."
Dan's particular interest is the visual arts.
Dan has been blogging on the visual arts for many months, on behalf of his employer, a Washington, DC-based video production firm.
Now he's blogging on his own.
I can't recommend his posts enough. The topics Dan chooses—and the wholly original ways in which he explores them—will open your eyes to the creative process.
Take a look!
PR firm Edelman just released its annual Trust Barometer.
With it, Edelman recommends that organizations begin now to broadcast the opinions of in-house experts.
That's because social media "over-friending" has triggered a falloff in trust of peers.
With the rise of social networks, trust in peers has fallen 21 points on the Trust Barometer during the past five years.
In 2006, 68% of people said they trusted peers. Today, 47% say they do.
But trust in experts has increased 8 points during the same period.
In 2006, 62% of people said they trusted experts. Today, 70% say they do.
"To stand out in a very cluttered media world, organizations must increasingly activate their internal subject matter experts as thought leaders," says Steve Rubel, director of insights for Edelman Digital.
Capitalizing on in-house experts isn't easy. For tips, see my special report, Path of Persuasion.
