Two of the web’s foremost commentators and thought leaders in the social media space, Chris Brogan and Jeremiah Owyang, has teamed up to bring us an awesome list of 50 checkpoint items to accomplish when augmenting our online marketing strategies. Chris has his original post up here. At the suggestion of one of the comments from @jonburg , Jeremiah has gone ahead and broken up the list nicely into 5 social computing objectives as defined by Forrester Research, where Jeremiah is a senior analyst.

Chris Brogan http://www.chrisbrogan.com

I will now shamefully reproduce the list here after having given due credit and linking to the original authors ‘ posts above. First to Chris Brogan for producing the list, and second to Jeremiah for organizing it for us according to the 5 social computing objectives. In the spirit of sharing with proper attribution, I don’t think either of them will mind too much

Listening: Gleaning market and customer insight and intelligence

10. Build sentiment measurements, and listen to the larger web for how people are talking about your customer.
11. Learn which bloggers might care about your customer. Learn how to measure their influence.
14. Build conversation maps for your customers using Technorati.com , Google Blogsearch, Summize, and FriendFeed.
21. Collect case studies of social media success. Tag them “socialmediacasestudy” in del.icio.us.
25. Search Summize.com for as much data as you can find in Twitter on your product, your competitors, your space.
32. Make WebsiteGrader.com your first stop for understanding the technical quality of a website.
33. Make Compete.com your next stop for understanding a site’s traffic. Then, mash it against competitors’ sites.
34. Learn how not to ask for 40 pieces of demographic data when giving something away for free. Instead, collect little bits over time. Gently.
38. Track your inbound links and when they come from blogs, be sure to comment on a few posts and build a relationship with the blogger.
39. Find a bunch of bloggers and podcasters whose work you admire, and ask them for opinions on your social media projects. See if you can give them a free sneak peek at something, or some other “you’re special” reward for their time and effort (if it’s material, ask them to disclose it).

Talking: Engaging in a two way discussion to get your message out (and get messages in)

2. Build blogs and teach conversational marketing and business relationship building techniques.
5. Create informational podcasts about a product’s overall space, not just the product.
8. Check out Twitter as a way to show a company’s personality. (Don’t fabricate this).
9. Couple your email newsletter content with additional website content on a blog for improved commenting.
13. Try out a short series of audio podcasts or video podcasts as content marketing and see how they draw.
19. Experiment with the value of live video like uStream.tv and Mogulus, or Qik on a cell phone.
23. Explore distribution. Can you reach more potential buyers/users/customers on social networks.
24. Don’t forget early social sites like Yahoogroups and Craigslist. They still work remarkably well.
26. Practice delivering quality content on your blogs, such that customers feel educated / equipped / informed.
28. Turn your blog into a mobile blog site with Mofuse. Free.
30. Ensure you offer the basics on your site, like an email alternative to an RSS subscription. In fact, the more ways you can spread and distribute your content, the better.
40. Learn all you can about how NOT to pitch bloggers. Excellent resource: Susan Getgood.
41. Try out shooting video interviews and video press releases and other bits of video to build more personable relationships. Don’t throw out text, but try adding video.
44. Experiment with different lengths and forms of video. Is entertaining and funny but brief better than longer but more informative? Don’t stop with one attempt. And try more than one hosting platform to test out features.

Jeremiah Owyang http://www.web-strategist.com

Energizing: Letting your customers tell your prospects on your behalf (viral, word of mouth)

1. Add social bookmark links to your most important web pages and/or blog posts to improve sharing.
3. For every video project purchased, ensure there’s an embeddable web version for improved sharing.
4. Learn how tagging and other metadata improve your ability to search and measure the spread of information.
12. Download the Social Media Press Release (pdf) and at least see what parts you want to take into your traditional press releases.
36. Help customers and prospects connect with you simply on your various networks. Consider a Lijit Wijit or other aggregator widget.
47. Spread good ideas far. Reblog them. Bookmark them. Vote them up at social sites. Be a good citizen.

Supporting: Getting your customers to self-support each other

6. Build community platforms around real communities of shared interest.
7. Help companies participate in existing social networks, and build relationships on their turf.
15. Experiment with Flickr and/or YouTube groups to build media for specific events. (Marvel Comics raised my impression of this with their Hulk statue Flickr group).
18. Start a community group on Facebook or Ning or MySpace or LinkedIn around the space where your customer does business. Example: what Jeremiah Owyang did for Hitachi Data Systems.
29. Learn what other free tools might work for community building, like MyBlogLog.
35. Remember that the people on social networks are all people, have likely been there a while, might know each other, and know that you’re new. Tread gently into new territories. Don’t NOT go. Just go gently.
37. Voting mechanisms like those used on Digg.com show your customers you care about which information is useful to them.

Embracing: Building better products and services through collaboration with clients

31. Investigate whether your product sells better by recommendation versus education, and use either wikis and widgets to help recommend, or videos and podcasts for education.
50. Use the same tools you’re trying out externally for internal uses, if that makes sense, and learn about how this technology empowers your business collaboration, too.

Strategy, Training, and Planning
Many of these aren’t directly social media tactics, but they are great rules of thumb.

16. Recommend that your staff start personal blogs on their personal interests, and learn first hand what it feels like, including managing comments, wanting promotion, etc.
17. Map out an integrated project that incorporates a blog, use of commercial social networks, and a face-to-face event to build leads and drive awareness of a product.
20. Attend a conference dealing with social media like New Media Expo, BlogWorld Expo, New Marketing Summit (disclosure: I run this one with CrossTech), and dozens and dozens more. (Email Chris for a calendar).
22. Interview current social media practitioners. Look for bridges between your methods and theirs.
27. Consider the value of hiring a community manager. Could this role improve customer service? Improve customer retention? Promote through word of mouth?
42. Explore several viewpoints about social media marketing.
43. Women are adding lots of value to social media. Get to know the ones making a difference. (And check out BlogHer as an event to explore).
45. Work with practitioners and media makers to see how they can use their skills to solve your problems. Don’t be afraid to set up pilot programs, instead of diving in head first.
46. People power social media. Learn to believe in the value of people. Sounds hippie, but it’s the key.
48. Don’t be afraid to fail. Be ready to apologize. Admit when you’ve made a mistake.
49. Re-examine who in the organization might benefit from your social media efforts. Help equip them to learn from your project.

I came across a very insightful post over at Experience: The Blog where the author uses Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to tease out some of the reasons for online behaviour, in this case why people join online communities. It is a very good analysis of the motivations behind people’s behaviour and set me thinking about the online social media scene in South Africa and why companies who engage in online social media campaigns may be jumping the gun a bit.

South Africa is still in a very fragile state of uneasy equilibrium socio-politically, nearly fifteen years after the end of apartheid the overall majority of the black population is not very much better off than before the end of apartheid in 1994. Economically, the majority of the country’s wealth still are controlled by a small minority of predominantly white people, the reasons and dynamics for such a state of affairs which falls outside the scope of our present conversation. The result is that when it comes to information technology and the ecosystem around ICT tools, we still have a very unequal distribution of access to these modalities. In other words, the average black student or child still does not have access to computing resources and their parents still are not in a position to afford a computer; most of the time they are still struggling to just provide in the basic needs like proper housing and enough food on the table in the face of a struggling economy and rising fuel and food prices.

When one speaks of social media, you are thus speaking, in a South African context, of a small minority of predominantly white geeks and geekettes with an odd sprinkling of Coloured, Black and Indians thrown in who are leading the conversation and an incestuous in-clique parrotting and echoing each other’s blogs and blog posts. Recently a furore broke out when one freelance journalist made a list of the prominent figures in the South African blogosphere and almost all of them turned out to be white. One coloured blogger quickly reacted with a counter-list of non-white South African “Web 2.0″ personalities and his post was severely criticized by many on the “white list” as being divisive and hurting those he mentioned on the list. How exactly it would hurt them I could not imagine, I suppose all the white boys would fort up and keep the business and the action within the in-clique and ignore completely anything that any of these “troublesome” coloureds have to say…?

The point is, social media and social media marketing and social media strategy is an almost pointless pursuit for businesses in South Africa when the same small group of people who are also the same group who got the contracts to develop these sites, now have to go around and stir up their small, limited circle of friends to go and see what Company A or B has put up and comment there or add a digg, or del.icio.us bookmark or in South Africa’s case Muti or Laaik.it or Amatomu or Afrigator. Once anyone has put anything up and he goes: “hey guys go look at my post” a small number of his/her buddies will rush over and throw two cents worth of “nice post, keep at it” into the comments collection-box and be on their merry way to look at the next shiny little pebble on the internet highway.

When it comes to companies releasing press releases about new products/programs or initiatives they are launching, we are stuck in the old top-down hierarchical mentality of wanting to control the message and releasing stiff, formal templated media releases that does not contain anything with a potential of going viral or being worthy of being shared with your friends on Facebook. The Vodacom animated meerkat is a much despised brand property on Facebook where there is actually a group called “I fucking hate the animated meerkat from Vodacom” with 15,642 (South African) members.

Some of the bigger media companies have in-house “social media experts”, mostly web development geeks who saw potential in this new frontier opening up and all sorts of “consultants” offering “New Media and Social Media Strategy” services for exorbitant fees. Most of these consultants are based in closed in-clique centres like Johannesburg and Cape Town where most of the action is happening and the market is so small that there is usually stiff competition from the same group of individuals for the available social media gigs. This then inevitably leads to some behind-the-scenes intrigue and gossip mongering and trying to keep it “within the family”.

This means that in a South African context where an incompetent and corrupt government alliance are failing all it’s people, every community is closing in on itself and protecting it’s own and being very protective of the available small pieces of pie going around. The hierarchy of needs that Maslow talks about thus comes into play with people who have access to technology and the education enabling them to wield that technology adequately and competently, keeping it to themselves in order to remain ahead of the pack in the African bush. You then find a situation like you have at present in the online Web 2.0 South African zoo, those who have been benefitting from apartheid through privileged education and upbringing and access to good education and resources banding together only with those from similar privileged backgrounds.

Everyone else is not “worthy” and it is not their problem or their concern why “these people” aren’t educated or sophisticated enough, it’s been fifteen years of Affirmitive Action and BEE after all! We thus see a very vicious racism rearing it’s head where the Australian passports and emigration visas are being dusted off and old Afrikaner Boer generals are nostalgically praised in popular culture to signal a return to the “good old days” if only in spirit and not in the everyday reality.

My point in waffling on like this? People form communities around common and shared interests. Many of the small minority of active participants in the South African blogosphere or Web 2.0 scene share only one thing: being white and their parents having benefitted from the previous apartheid regime. They are thus the custodians of the old wealth and the old ways and are doing everything to protect their position of privilege from being usurped by pretentious nouveau-riche blacks who wants to overrun and nationalize everything in sight. Recent political developments like the ANC youth league president threatening with killing for the very unsuitable presidential candidate does not exactly help in easing their fears.

So social media strategy and social media marketing online in South Africa is only existent for a small minority of privileged white geeks and their equally small potential white and privileged audience who might be enticed into visiting a site and leaving a comment or sharing it on a social bookmarking site. The rest of the population do not have computers, many access these sites from work or school or university and then only to check the odd e-mail and zombie bite their friends on Facebook. Most of the teenagers are clogging up the GPRS networks with Mxit from their mobile phones and those (mostly white kids) that have access to 3G use it to play XBOX or World of WarCraft online.

DISCLAIMER: This is my personal blog, the opinions expressed here belongs to me alone. You are free to differ from me in the comments, but please keep it civil and on point, I tolerate no monkey business

This is one of my all-time favourite songs from Stain’d, it reminds me of my own daughter…! Enjoy this, Aaron Lewis is an amazing vocalist.

When I stayed in Burma (2001 – 2004), I had the opportunity to watch this amazing display of acrobatic skill and showmanship while travelling through the country as an ordained Buddhist monk from monastery to monastery. I got this in my Twine digest today, and you can see the write-up about the film Mystic Ball over here. I got my Twine invite only a couple of weeks ago, but it is the most valuable and high signal ratio social network out there to date. When you subscribe to groups or Twines around topics of interest, you always get a daily digest of all the high-value articles and links that has been Twined or shared by memebers who also belong to that group of Twines. Never has a day gone by that there was not a couple of articles that I clicked on to go read or save and share, mostly to do with Web Development, Open Source, Linux, Myanmar (Burma), Tibet, Buddhism, Social Networking, Semantic web 3.0, Twitter and WordPress . My Twine profile is over here. Please leave a comment or send me a mail if you would like me to send you a Twine invite, it is in invitation-only beta at the moment, but I have a couple of invites to share

From the website:

This lovely, lyrical documentary introduces Chinlone, a Burmese sport that soars somewhere between acrobatics, hackey sack, and Balinese dance. This game, unknown outside of Burma, became an obsession for Greg Hamilton. For the past 20 years he’s painfully tried to whisk the distinctive woven-rattan ball, faithfully returning to Burma to play in tournaments, becoming the first westerner to do so. What makes this film so rewarding is Hamilton’s candid autobiographical account of his slow learning. At first he is laughed at, but after 8 years of filming, he slowly gains respect from the Burmese. Chinlone is a beautiful non-competitive game. You “win” by keeping the ball in the air for your teammates — a fit metaphor for life, and a perfect frame for this extremely contemplative but dynamic film. Greg’s story is really not about sport, or the Zen of Burmese Hackey Sack, but about how to learn and love.

– KK