
Attendees were excited to see Owyang before his keynote speech at the next day’s Internet Strategy Forum (ISF) on Thursday, July 23rd, at the Governor Hotel in Downtown Portland.
As we drank Widmer beer and pizza, Owyang answered some of our questions - some of which cam through Twitter (through tweeting @SocialMediaPDX).
Note:
If you want to follow along with what was said, you can check out the hashtag #smcpdx.

Take for example Megan McCarthy of CNET - she’s a traditional journalist but publishes as fast as the bloggers. She publishes a post immediately and then lets people know she’ll be updating the post as the news increases.
I’ll let you know something - Embargoes are almost dead. TechCrunch doesn’t honor Embargoes when they get them from large companies. As soon as that Embargo goes – it gets published. But it’s all real time now - kind of a free-for all. The rules have changed.
The think is - startups are cheap. It takes 15K -20K to get a startup running And VC’s are going to honor that. There’s still going to be money coming into the space. Because it’s cheap to run a startup these days.
Lets talk about the challenges - they’re focusing on the tools and features, not about what consumers and business want and need.
You can tell whether these companies are going to survive or not by just looking at their homepage. Are they focused on the tools and the features, or are they focused on ‘how can I help you?’
I was just over at Jive. They understand that very well over there. Radian6 is getting the hang of that in the startup space. They’re hiring people out of enterprise.
That’s the wrong question. The right question is - is the audience for that small business on Twitter? There are a lot of people out there that should be asking clients this question when they provide social media marketing services.
Most small businesses and restaurants are Using MySpace, and then Facebook comes around.
At Forrester we have a methodology. The POST methodology. It’s in that order. Not TSOP - that’s backwards, and not even a real word!
First is Demographics, Psychographics, Technographics. How do they use technologies and where are they online? Are they reading blogs.
The O in POST is the business objective. What are you trying to do? Make them do things better, listen to them more?
The next piece is Strategy.
What is social media strategy? It’s not the tools. It’s all the things that happen behind the scenes to make it successful. The policies. The engagement.
Then, at the very end, the Tools. The Tools come last.
In review:
PEOPLE
OBJECTIVES
STRATEGIES
And then
TOOLS.
It is better to focus on the long-term piece - what are people doing? And how to work with them?
Chris Brogan does a lot of good stuff. I’ll just start with the blogs. Razorfish has been doing a lot of good stuff. I think the best way is to go to the companies and pick apart what they’re doing well.
Comcast, Dell, Half-and-half Microsoft, Dell.
And those changing things? Best BUy is tryin to do a lot with social.
Intercontinental Group.
One of the best persons to follow is Obama.
We see corrpoations merge all the time and cultures change all the time. Amazon and Zappos, for instance.
I was with Tony a few weeks ago.
I think the big difference is that the culutes are very difference. What you might expect is that a lot of the inventory will appear on Zappos.
This is important to know. Social media doesn’t scale. If we’re all about building one on one social media with these tools. It doesn’t scale.
Zappos is about one to one relations. You ask them a question and they’ll give you a response. But that means they have to hire one person for every 100 interactions. If you do, you’re going to have to start outsourcing.
One thing you can do to solve this problem is to focus on word of mouth marketing on the customer side, or get the customers to help each other. They haven’t built a tool that has customers help each other yet. Maybe they’ll build a page that lets people correlate certain items of clothing with shoes.
We’re just at the early stages of references and recommendations. Our research on Trust. You should expect your friend recommendations to appear on
rather than being supported by people you don’t actually know.
There was an article in Wired about the Facebook wall. With my friends telling me what to buy and what to eat. That is their exact strategy.
The social networks are Facebook and Twitter is not to be a destination site but to get the content out there. And they know that.
My most re-tweeted tweet was “IBM is afraid of Microsoft who is afraid of Google who is afraid of Facebook who is afraid of Twitter who is afraid of whales”. I know this because each of those companies has told me who they are afraid of.
Consumers don’t think of walled gardens. Most people don’t know or care.
People don’t remember that Email is the biggest social network - and no one has leveraged that yet.
Email does all of those things - Email signing your name, CC’ing, E-mail lists and groups.
No Email is not broken. All the A-List bloggers communicate by Email. I’ve totally seen it happen. They don’t use the tools. They use Email.
Yahoo Gmail, ect. These are the dominant social networks.
There’s a lot of innovation at Yahoo!, but we only see it in pieces and spurts.
That’s definitely a trend we’ll see in 2010. Aggregation.
Right now the trend is pollination - that everyone is trying to get things out there. That creates a lot of buzz. Friendfeed, Google Wave - all of these things will be trying to aggregate the signal.
And people are saying –“ is this going to be a tool used in Enterprise?” Well, it’s going to be as successful as Google Docs is in the Enterprise. Google is not an enterprise play. We’ll have to see how that plays out.
Kelly Feller: The goal is to minimize the touch points .We think
“Oh my gosh” Twitter might increase that - Kelly Feller - From Intel social media.
Audience: Is there a cost differential for Twitter vs. calls?
Owyang: If people are Tweeting about Best Buy in their free time or off hours? Should they get paid? No - because they’d be doing it in their free time. This is something that’s not been solved yet.
Here’s something that’s happening. CRM - Oracle. There’s basically a huge database about you and what you do. Lots of companies are pulling in data about you and what you like. And then if someone says, “Arggh! This Sony TV has 4 dead pixels” - they know to send someone out - via a tweet or comment - to help them with that. But if people use a different ID, it is difficult to know where something comes from.
The second thing is that companies are not ready for this – they’re just like “woah”.
Mobile in Japan is big. Did you know they only use the phone for 4% of the time to talk on it? It’s a different type of behavior - it’s a different type of engagement.
Audience: Why do they have two?
UncleNate: One for talking and one for data?
Audience: Youth don’t E-mail. They have E-mial accounts just to set up social accounts and things.
Owyang: One of my relatives in college says she only uses E-mail to talk with old folks like me.
But as the digital natives move into the work force, they’ll be forced to use Email.
Owyang: It’s interesting that Twitter is more skewed towards older people. But youth have been using SMS for years.
As an analyst at Forrester Research, Jeremiah is on the cutting edge of all things social media. He authored the recent report “The Future of the Social Web” and is #2 on the “Twitter Power 150 List.”
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Social Media Club (SMC) was started in 2006 by Chris Heuer, co-founder and partner at The Conversation Group, and Kristie Wells, Co-Founder and President of Social Media Club, with the core mission to:
Social Media Club Portland is one of a growing number of SMC chapters across the globe.
Interested in getting involved or would like more information? Feel free to contact us.
Internet Strategy Forum Summit is a way to engage with six global brand executives in a single day at an affordable price and gain actionable Internet strategy insights at the Internet Strategy Forum Summit on July 23 and 24 at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Join other Internet executive attendees and our thought-leading presenters from top companies such as Forrester (Jeremiah Owyang), Hewlett-Packard, Intuit, Xerox, Intel, Portland Trail Blazers and WelchmanPierpoint.
These experts will share their experiences and ideas on how to best leverage the Internet and integrate it into your overall business strategy. Register for the Internet Strategy Forum and save 15% with our discount code: SMC.
Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and new media consultant based in Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.
This morning I met with Brooks Gilley, Partner and Managing Director of 52ltd Portland’s only locally owned and operated full-service staffing resource for the creative industry. We had a great discussion on how marketing is changing, and how some companies really ‘get it’, or at least attempt to experiment with this strange new medium, while others are left behind.
We were meeting to talk about a creative event that will be occuring on May 27th at Univeristy of Oregon’s White Stag Building in downtown Portland. The event will feature four panelists from fields ranging from advertising, social media and sociology/anthropology. I’ll be on a panel discussing cyborg anthropology, new media frameworks, and changes in marketing in the digital era.
I’ll be speaking with a variety of others, including an executive from Crispin Porter + Bogusky (the agency that worked on the infamous Facebook Burger King Whopper Sacrifice campaign).
Other panelists will include the Directory of Interactive Media for the Portland Trailblazers (whose community engagement strategy has been quite impressive), as well the possibility of a professor of Sociology from Portalnd State University, but I am unsure of his name yet. All told, the event should be a great chance for all of us to share different perspectives and strategies with each other and an audience of creatives, freelancers, and marketers.
I’ll post more details as the event nears, but it should begin at around 6:15 Pm at the White Stag Building on NW Couch street. There will be ample time for networking, so if you’re excited to meet new people, come on out. It is a free event too, so you’ve got nothing to lose. Check the 52ltd website for details as May 27th approaches, and if you’re looking to hire a creative or looking for a creative gig, consider making an appointment with them.
If you have any questions you’d like us to cover on the panel, feel free to E-mail me at caseorganic [at] gmail [dot] com, or simply reply to me at @caseorganic on Twitter.
Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo
This episode features Troy Harlan, wherein we talked about information gathering, filtering and consuming (naturally,) human factors, trilobites, reading at 2,000 words per minute, INTP’s, striving for objectivity, The Black Swan, hunches, and why it’s better to “have no map at all than have the wrong map”—all recorded on the road from St. Johns to downtown Portland.

Today at 2Pm, all of the members of Portland Advertising Federation’s Colaboratory program presented their final marketing plan to Sameunderneath, a local sustainable clothing company.
Team Lattice showed a 5 minute video about their experiences before delving into the presentation.
Some of the brilliant ideas they came up with were as follows:
“People who give a Damn”
And for people who love music——>Advertising on Pandora.com”
Lattice team members ended by handing out stickers to everyone in the audience, saying, “Please, finish the statements on these “biodegradable, non-toxic stickers” and place them in locations that are poinigiant (and
Ryan Christensen, Founder of Sameunderneath said, “this idea is genius…(holds up the stickers with fill-in blanks) …when I first began Sameundenerath
I was live blogging the Colaboratory Presentation as it happened, and I received a reponse to the stickers from @willtorres from Los Angeles, California.
@willtorres: “@caseorganic yeah, i love the stickers idea a lot. i was going to imitate a project i found with stickers throughout the city.”
Looks like their idea will be a great success.
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Luke Rolka:
Sameundeneath started as an educational curriculum…an idea. Now it has transformed into this business model. This socially responsible business.
“What we want to do is take this and make it big — move it national”.
“We want to take Saemunderneath and turn it into a model of super awesome success”.
Bryan Davidson: Even as Samunderneath grows, there are certain values that must stay the same.
Bryan Davidson’s words were, true, charismatic, thoughtful and provocative, which mirrored exactly the bullet points on the screen.
“You’re not just selling clothes, you’re selling a value system.”
“It is important to keep things small while thinking large. So we propose a new role of Community Director, because the world needs more Ryans.”
Luke Rolka: Consumers these days are really looking for ways to engage in a brand.The director is taking the Sameunderneath values and living and breathing them…becoming the representation of the brand. here in Portland. Then they can take that knowledge and adapt it to a city that they’re going to be running, and see how they can do it there.
Christine Vo: Sameunderneath is known very well in portland right now, but we want to take that internationally.
A way for designers to really get their name out there and show off their work.
This was a decidedly different take then the music /urban street appelation basis of the Team Lattice presentation.
Founding of a Corporate Magazine, each zine with region focus, showing what each of those locations are doing with their local community and the Sameunderneath brand.
Then Unveiled a New Website: in which each of the pages have great design, Documentary Series, Philosophy, Community. “Get Involved” tab.
“What would you say to the world if you had 30 seconds to speak your mind?”
Rebels are encouraged to speak their minds on any subject and submit the video to the Sameunderneath website.
In order for you to grow, you have to engage with the customer. How better than by growing pieces of paper? Flyers embedded with Wildflower seeds. They can be buried in the backyard and have the words, “grow your paper and your ideas”.
“Each city’s flyer will have a different skyline, and we will try to get local artists to do the images for them. At every point, it is important to get local artists to do things for the compay…all these things create sustainable organic growth frr your company.
Then at the end presented a marketing plan roundup which included:
~.——————–
Now Ryan has to choose. It is a very intense decision. He leaves to use the restroom.
Sameunderneath had a 1.5 million growth revenue last year. The company is interested in affordable and efficient marketing methods for growth.
It all comes down to the customer base. Are they artsy and into film? Are they into music? The marketing plans seem to target slightly different demographics. Lattice presents an urban grassroots music-base, and Kiwi defines the demographic as a more thoughtful, artsy, film-loving creature.
The success of either marketing plan all comes down to what best fits the true demographic of Sameunderneath consumers.
To Team Lattice: One of your best points was the paper; that pamphlet that has the story that goes into the stores to educate the people. Something that each floor sales staff can read to better understand the product.
To Team Kiwi: We’ve been doing flyers since the beginning of the company, but now we’re starting to do personal invitations. It’s a way to say, we don’t want to waste your time with pieces of paper. With a private invite, people have to go out of their way to ask their friends to attend an event, and it is more word of mouth than objective and detached.
Ryan: This is a really difficult decision. They’re two different plans.
I really liked the fact that Team Lattice had the fill-in sticker that told the story of the brand. At the end of the day, it’s a new version of “hello my name is” Things like that are so personal and so engaged with community. It could go anywhere and be filled in with the culture of that community, that space.
To Team Lattice: I thought you ladies did a great job and restrained it to what really matterned.
In addition, your presentation’s marketing recommendations started small and then went big, just like how Sameunderneath should be growing. If you had shown me the magazine in the beginning, I would’ve discounted it right from the start. Do you have any idea how much it costs to publish something like that?
To Team Kiwi:What I really liked a lot was Bryan. You were kind of the leader of the pack. It wasn’t a presentation—you were being you.
Ryan buys enough time to think, and then makes his decision. It is Team Lattice. But he points out that he doesn’t want to make a decision at all, because both teams came up with exceptional ideas.
“I would like each and every one of you to E-mail me,” he says, “and each of you to come to visit my creative team. I want both teams to be there to put in opinions and voice their two cents.”
Ryan added that, “Between now and the end of the month—everything in the store is $20 from now until the end of the month. Just let the store staff know that you’re a member of Colab and this discount will be available to you”.
According to Malcolm McCullough, author of Digital Ground, “Design is the Product”. Design is what people experience, what they see…all text, all seen and unseen material. It is that Psychology of space that design induces that makes a person feel positively or negatively about a space or thing. Online voluntary communities need a base under which to interact. They cannot be forced into acting voluntarily. They must weave themselves into the brand’s story.
I believe Team Lattice did this the best, because they created three distinct and affordable ways in which consumers could weave themselves into the brand’s story while helping to tell that story. The hang tags describing each piece of clothing and the company’s philosophy, the fill-in stickers, and the concert were all integrating factors that weaved the brand into the lives of the consumers.
It has been an amazing experience watching the #Colab members interact with each other and their agencies. I can’t wait to watch how they develop in the future. I’ve never seen such a dedicated and intelligent group of designers work so hard on a project before. Kudos to everyone. Team Lattice and Team Kiwi will go incredibly far, and soon.
Sponsored by the Portland Ad Federation, the COLAB project believes that “Interning at 1 agency is so pre-millennial”, and takes a different route in inspiring the creativity and professional education of its interns.
From the Colaboratory website: “COLABORATORY takes place over 6 weeks in Portland, Oregon. 10 participants are selected and individually paired with 3 of the 11 agencies based on their strengths and interests. Interns spend 2 intensely focused weeks at each agency learning from all disciplines”.
Also check out the Team Lattice business card: It grows with their ideas.

All of the members of COLABORATORY have been blogging about their adventures since their first day. Bram Pitoyo built a way to follow all of the action at once. It also checks the latest Twitter conversation that’s hastagged #COLAB, so you do none of the work and get all the results. Check out Bram Pitoyo’s COLAB Feed Aggregator from Yahoo! Pipes.
If you currently use them, RSS feeds are a great way to accumulate timely information from reliable and influential sources. RSS feeds are one of the best ways to keep up on social trends, new tech gagets, people, and business ideas. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, there’s a 3.75 minute Commoncraft Video called RSS Feeds in Plain English.
One of the most useful ways I’ve been able to use RSS feeds has been through the use of an RSS aggregator as a search engine. My favorite platform to use is NewsFire (click to download) for Mac, but other RSS readers exist for Windows, Linux and Gmail.
The best part about Newsfire is that it has a search feature at the bottom right corner of the screen. The search tool allows many blog posts to be searched through at the same time.
This search feature can be used to search through all aggregated RSS feeds.
Categorizing Data:
Newsfire makes it easy to categorize data into groups. I chose Lifehacking-type blogs, Tech News, Design News, SEO, Marketing, Business Development, Usability/Architecture, Local Portland Groups, and Mail/Personal. I grabbed mail my mail from Gmail and my @caseorganic Twitter ID from Summize.
The only limitation is that you cannot rearrange the categories. This will hopefully probably be fixed with NewsFire’s next release.
The key to using RSS as a Search Engine is going out on the web and finding the best sources that aggregate the best data, and then storing it all in your NewsFire feedcapture device. Then, wait for the data to accumulate. Go to NewsFire –> Preferences –> Feeds, and set “Delete items” to “Never”. If you use Spotlight, you can enable indexing of content so that you can use Spotlight to search your feeds as well.
With this structure in place, I can search my RSS reader for “local SEO”, to check news related to these terms. Another option for maxxing out your RSS reader is to subscribe to Twitter topic feeds via Summize. That way, you not only get the topics that are being blogged about, but what everyone in the world is saying about those topics.
Peter Morville is the master of establishing his link estate on the Google search for his name. If your online presnece is not as robust as his when you search your own name in Google, you might want to work on your Flickr account, Linkedin profile, Digg profile, Stumbleupon profile, person and work blogs, and conference proceedings.
Case in point:
Strategy:
Assure you’re going to conference A, next week. You’re really excited becuase you have some great material (or not), and you’d like to use the mateiral to it’s full advantage.
Web 2.0 can help you. Instead of a document that exists as a pressentation at only one location in space and time, you can let your information out to many differnet outlets by blogging, Twittering, sending guest posts, and uploading your Powerpoint slides to slideshare and telling your Twitter community about it (something Peter Morville does excellently).
I. You’re going to the conference A in a week. Post on your (professional blog)(personal blog) ” I am going to be presenting next week at PLACE.TIME (LINK TO CONFERENCE) — I will be talking about (TALK ABOUT IT).
II. When you’re at conference A. Post on your (professional blog)(personal blog) “Hello from PLACE - these people are here (LINK TO THESE PEOPLE), and how SWEET they are because they’re presenting (talk about what they’re presenting).
II.5 On Twitter, while at conference A, write “I am at (LOCATION) about to present at (link to conference)”.
II.75 Use Mac’s Address Book to immediately enter in business card information, Twitter names, ect during the table breaks. Also write how/where you met them in the comments section (put their history, what they spoke about, and how their expersite can benefit your future self).
III. After conference A, post on your (professional blog)(personal blog), the conference proceedings (photos (use Flickr), briefs of (also link to this from Twitter (use tinyurl.com to make the url length shorter).
IV. If conference has site, try to post on their site with a copy of your speech/lecture/presenation/powerpoint, or your profile. Also comment on the conference on the conference website (if possible) to network with other conference visitors.
V. Post on socially conscious websites who are repositories of information on micromanaging…ect.
End goal:
Emulate Peter Morville’s online presence.
Over time, colonize as much of the google page about your name as possible.
Collective Intellect is a Boulder based company that uses the collective ideas of bloggers to predict the rise and fall of stock values. I watched Don Springer, President & CEO of Collective Intellect, present at the 2006 DOW Jones Emerging Ventures Forum 2006.
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Collective Intellect taps into tacit knowledge in order to reduce company risk. The Internet allows the generation of tacit knowledge because it is a lateral media instead of a central one, such as television. It has a feedback system, because it is a product and a holding contained for consumer generated media.
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How does one find the spring from which a river of ideas flows? Each profession, each category of interest has its own spring, or head influence. In fashion, the top design houses determine the fashions that trickle down to lower level designers. Though the Internet allows rapid communication to occur, the spread of ideas still takes time. In computer terms this is called ‘lag’.
When the CEO presented this company to venture capitalists, he described the company structure as follows:
This company uses an algorithm to determine the highest level idea-maker or blog of highest social influence. The algorithm is applied to blogs within an interest category, and each blog is assigned points based on blog visit stats, number of comments, and certain category-specific keywords. Blogs are also analyzed for lags in category-specific keywords from site to site, so that blogs who use category-specific keywords sooner than other blogs can be assessed.
Once the points are accrued, it is easy to see which blogs have access to relevant information more quickly than others. These blogs have the power to change ideas of other ‘downstream’ blogs, and have the least lag time in accessing and reporting on relevant ideas. Financial Companies pay for access to ranked blogger data.
Consider the following: