A couple of weeks ago I shared that I wanted to work directly with a local company. Since then many people have been asking me about my next steps. I am pleased to share today that I will be starting June 9th as Senior Manager Social Media Marketing at Webtrends. In that role, I will be working on the following:

Developing a baseline program - Specify a structured program built on proven social media strategies, like blogging, that will deliver measurable value. Program definition includes infrastructure, business processes, and staff training. Campaign support - Assist the rest of the marketing team to support campaigns using the baseline program. Develop strategies to support camapaigns outside of the baseline program using knowledge and experience gained through R&D. Research and Development - Systematic evaluation of new tools, services, and networks to vet new strategies for application in the baseline program, campaigns, and further R&D. Subject Matter Expert - Assist management with the development of policies, tools, materials, and training for the global organization. Provide Subject Matter Expert support to consulting services, engineering, and product teams on social media mechanics.

We discussed the job description and title for quite a bit before selecting Senior Manager Social Media Marketing. At the end of the day, I work for the marketing department so my success is measured in terms of branding and lead generation. I was reluctant to use Social Media Marketing because there are so many people out there giving that title a bad name. It’s got a bit of a smarmy reputation for overly aggressive sales tactics and Big Brother style stalking of customers. We considered the title Community Manager, but that role is really about caring for a community owned by the company, such as a developer’s forum or a support community. So, we decided to call a spade a spade because trying to call the position anything else felt like an attempt to skirt around the negative connotations. Social media marketing is in it’s infancy and struggling with reputation problems akin to the early days of email marketing and direct marketing before that. My goal is to help bring respect to the title by demonstrating that companies and customers can have a harmonious interaction through social media that helps both parties happily exchange value (fair money for desired products/services). My lofty goal is to show that social media is currently the best venue to achieve and scale truly consensual value exchanges. My experience tells me that informed consent is the most sustainable business model. I believe that consensual value exchange is the result of good communication and that it provides the optimal outcome for both parties. I’m super excited to take on this challenge along side an energized Webtrends team. Wish us luck!

The first dot com bust aligns almost perfectly with the generally accepted inflection point between web 1.0 and web 2.0. Economic forces killed tired business models in favor of new and better ones. Well, here we are again. Economic forces are threatening to kill off many 2.0 businesses in favor of tech that improves productivity, not the ones working on luring eyeballs. Expect consumer innovation to slow as the available money shifts from the hands of advertisers to Enterprises hungry for productivity innovation. Evidence that the party is coming to a close:

Yahoo! merger Kleiner-Perkins announcing they won’t invest in 2.0 any longer Failed economy pushing for tech that will maximize productivity

The rise of meta data and the birth of context Web 1.0 connected people to content. Web 2.0 connected people to each other. Web 3.0 will push contextualized content to people. Some are calling it the semantic web. It has to do with distribution like RSS, SaaS, and APIs. Application architecture is overtaking the idea of a “page” as the basic building block of the web. The economic impact of this is the loss in inventory as pages disappear in favor of applications, dashboards, and aggregators. The coming wave of Web 2.0 failures is due to their dependence on ad supported business models. Ad revenue models only makes sense if you can get people to spend time on your site. Unfortunately for 2.0 companies, decreased ad spending by businesses hurt by the economic downturn will accelerate the distribution of 3.0 technology. So now comes service based business models. Subscription models replace desktop EULAs and they are billed from API usage, SaaS subscription dues, and so forth. What the world needs now is context The logical next question is what services do people need? We don’t need help creating content. We don’t need help connecting with other people. In a word, we need help with context. More specifically, we need help with the following:

Data portability and system interoperability Information overload Identity and reputation management Help spotting and acting on emergent value that comes from the network effect

The last bullet is a really hot space for innovation. Just today, Gil Yehuda wrote on the new ZD Net Forrester blog: “Although Web 2.0 tools present information, their use becomes increasingly more interesting when we look at the network of people who generate and care about the information.” Man, ain’t that the truth! The more people interact in a networked fashion, the more meta data that is available to help automate contextualization and spot emerging trends. We need that intelligence piped to users so they can quickly, and easily take action on it—preferably from a mobile device and with automated management. And, since we can’t remove people from the picture, we need etiquette built in. Someone is going to make a killing from an etiquette engine with a good API. Services that provide and aid in the management of social intelligence will be of strong value to the Enterprises, which is who has the money to pay for said innovation. The tech developed during this period will eventually trickle down to SMBs and the rest of the market much in the same way mainframe tech from 20 years ago, like virtualization, is doing today.

In June the NY Times reported that the average information worker is distracted for 28% of their day. Unstructured email communication makes it difficult to stay focused. I know I loose focus daily from some of these email offenses:

Rambling thought dumps The “FYI” atop a monster string of replys The CYA email that the sender incorrectly assessed needed to be CCed to you Noisy DLs

So, if unstructured email is a distraction, what’s the solution? Ultimately email is just a way to communicate. It’s not the one to blame. It is the lack of structure that allows people to ramble off topic, play “I didn’t get that email” games, and forward long conversations. IBM and its clients have known this for years, which is why they’ve earned and defended market share with their Lotus software. Lotus added much of the structure around email that was needed to make it productive. But, mail, electronic or otherwise, isn’t a silver communication bullet. Sometimes you need to IM someone. Sometimes you want to share something, but not with a particular person. Sometimes you want to have a group discussion that is easier to follow than a chain of “reply all” emails. Consumer social media burst into businesses to fill these other communication needs. To those of us used to consumer social media, we saw a ton of potential applications and value in bringing these tools to work. But, wise naysayers kept pressing for a better explanation. They wanted to know how these communication tools were going to serve a purpose. They didn’t want to invite another distraction inside the firewall. What’s the fear of microblogging in the enterprise? That it will be a distraction. What’s the fear of social networking within the enterprise? That people will be goofing off instead of working, ergo distracted. Slowly, the reality has set it for me. They are right to be concerned! If Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t help a business structure their communication, they can’t help workers be less distracted. If we introduce a bevy of content management tools (social or not) without some context and attention management, we’re just trading seats on the Titanic. What can we do about our distractedness? There are some tools available today that can help a person reduce their distraction. Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that today, it requires a ton of elbow grease to manage your attention and to stay on top of your communication. The current wave of communication innovation started in the consumer sector, and has only recently spread to businesses. Unfortunately, the communication needs for a business are different than that of a social scene. Vendors have popped up to meet the unique needs of a business, but it’s taking a few years because their needs are different than consumers—both drastically (needs lots of development time) and subtly (hard to recognize). Individuals need an unstructured, flat playground in order to pursue life, liberty, and property, which seems to make people happy. Businesses, on the other hand, have a mission that requires some structure in order be a productive, which seems to make them money and that makes them happy. So, when flat, unstructured tools emerged unplanned within businesses, it caused some commotion from the needs disconnect. Collaboration vendors have been busy focusing on interoperability and integration for the past couple of years, which is necessary because the innovation we really need requires this foundation to be in place. At the moment, we can buy many tools to create and receive content, but little to nothing to help make sense of it, much less automation assistance. However, that is changing. 2009 is going to be an interesting year for attention management tools in the enterprise. Socialtext is working on some innovative stuff with Signals, which provides automated context updates. Several vendors offer dashboards now, which allows workers to focus on the info that helps them do their jobs. Platform players are separating from the crowded pack of point solutions, and it will be interesting to see how the market shapes up by the end of ‘09. There’s also a divergence starting between vendors focusing on internal communication and the ones focusing on external communication needs. I think we’ll see the ones working on the consumer social media loose ground to the ones working on meeting the unique needs of a business. Copying and pasting consumer social media inside the firewall won’t a market leader create in the coming year. So what? What if we weren’t so distracted? What if our we had more time to be productive? What if we had that 28% of our day back? Imagine what we could do with that time! Can you think of something else that we could solve that would give nearly everyone a quarter to a third more time everyday?

Socialtext delivered version 3.0 of their software today, and announced Signals, which will be part of their 3.5 release. Signals is a micro messaging service that goes beyond copying and pasting Twitter behind the firewall, and the reason for much of my excitement. In an increasingly crowded market, content management just isn’t that compelling anymore. I can grab any number of solutions that will allow me to create and manage my content. Vendors have been working on this problem since it was called knowledge management and even before that. CMS providers have made it really easy for me to publish and distribute content. Thanks everyone, I totally love it! Today, I need help making sense of all of the content being created. I, like many others, am drowning in an ocean of content! What I need is less content and more context. If you know me, you know that I drank Marshall’s RSS kool-aid a while back and have been happily leveraging the tech to manage my own context and attention (he just shared some more of his magic at WordCamp too). Tools like Yahoo! Pipes, AideRSS, Netvibes, and more save my ass daily. But managing crazy RSS plumbing is getting to be a lot of work. I seriously need context automation. Context automation from Mad Libs Signals has me all excited because it helps me with context in a really innovative way. It has what they’re calling a MadLibs engine that sends automated updates in micro message format. Steve Gillmor describes it well: This implicit stream of data can be augmented via the REST API and the ATOM Publishing Protocol to create new update types in the form of a “MadLib” syntax: [Bob] [edited] this [page] in this [workspace] or [Jane] [closed] this [Salesforce lead] successfully, and so on. Gadgets can be dragged and dropped onto the Dashboard to let users pay attention across multiple workspaces, enterprise systems, and Web services. Pretty cool to not have to remember to send updates, huh? Nice to know you don’t need to rely on your teammates to remember to notify you, huh? Well, that’s just the beginning. Micro Message Rules With structured micro messaging comes rules that can automatically process updates. Socialtext hasn’t said they would develop this functionality, but since they have an API, someone could! Maybe you don’t care about every time someone edits a document in your department, but you care a ton about a specific document. You could set rules to turn off notices on document editing, but keep notices from a specific document. If people were manually updating that info, there would be no way to filter the data without natural language processing tools that don’t yet exist. Maybe you need to talk to someone, but they’re at lunch. You could create a rule to ping you when their status changes to available. Since it’s not manual like IM, the user doesn’t have to remember to update it. Now, think about rule sets! A job description could have a corresponding rule set helps the person stay focused on the updates that help them do their job