Why Social Media Practices Are Like Football

You’re not likely at the point yet where you have social media wired into everything. Right now, you may just be trying to figure out where to get started and deciding who is responsible for managing it and accounting for the results that grow from it. That’s perfectly okay, and it’s where a lot of organizations begin, say Jay Baer and Amber Naslund, social media strategists.
As social media adoption expands in an organization, however, you need a model that’s scalable and provides some autonomy within other functions and units but that maintains some central coordination for the purposes of consistency and clear communication. For that, let’s look to the football field for inspiration.
The Coaching Staff
The coaches are an organized, recognized group that acts as the hub for all things social media within a company. It can be small, with just a few people, or larger, with broad representation from a number of areas. If there’s already a dedicated social media team in your company, they often form the core of this group and are deeply active participants and advisors.
Coaches are responsible for making things happen in their own areas of the business, such as customer service, marketing, or product management. Each department might have one or two coaches who are represented as part of the larger group. Coaches take knowledge and consensus from the group regarding overall social media strategy and apply this information to the day-to-day functions of their team. They also bring back challenges, information, and successes to share with the other members of the coaching staff so that everyone can learn from one another.
They might work on:
Leadership: Championing social media strategies to management and throughout the organization to encourage participation
Intent: Laying out the underlying tenets and purposes for social media participation as an organization
Guidance: Developing social media participation guidelines – not just rules and regulations – that everyone can adopt and get behind
Best Practices: Be the center for subject matter expertise around the world of social media
Coordination: Keeping of the messy bits of internal communication and coordination around social media implementation
The Players
The players are the social media in action throughout the organization. Although the coaching staff is the center for overall social media approach, each coach works with his players to develop goals, strategy, and success metrics for their area of the business. The players are made up of the front line listening and response teams that actively mine social media for information and they are the ones who act on what they find.
Information gatherers form your centralized listening centers, monitoring the social web and mining it for relevant information, and they make sure that information gets to the people that need it. They might interact on behalf of the company as well, but their chief responsibility is to locate information for others to act. These players are early warning systems, researchers, and the information filters of corporate social media.
Frontline responders will be the faces of your company. They are the ones who work in a public light to either react to the needs and demands of your online community or provide a public-facing persona and presence for your brand. They conduct the proactive engagement and participation online to connect with customers, prospects, and the community as a whole. Social media and community management professionals are frontline responders, as are your communication teams and your customer service teams.
The Booth
Everyone in your company is affected by the speed and scale of social media, even if some corners are affected in a nonpublic way. These are the members of the booth—social media stakeholders whose participation may not be daily but is no less important.
Your writers and creative types might be part of the booth and build communication strategy. Human resources can focus social media efforts externally for employee recruitment or internally for talent retention. Research and development and product management capture insights from customers or the competition. Legal and compliance can focus on managing risk while adapting to an environment with less control. Analysts can derive actionable insights from data and feed those back to teams, and even IT can evolve their operations to support more fluid internal communication networks.
What ties all of these people together is the unifying work of the coaching staff. Departments take the strategic cues from the coaches and apply them downstream to their teams. They build independent, autonomous strategies that integrate with the larger whole, providing a networked but nimble approach to social coordination that can work for any company of any size.
The increasing speed of business calls for a distribution of decision making and authority throughout an organization to make us quicker, more nimble, and more responsive to the demands of immediacy. We need teams that communicate faster, with more fluidity and less friction. And to do that, we simply have to shatter the bottlenecks of process and control that have historically created a sense of security and consistency.
It’s time to organize our people and communications in a way that allows the elephant to dance much lighter on its feet.

Getting Creative With Video

YouTube user canzona uploaded a video to the web, downloaded it, then re-uploaded it one thousand times, gradually eliminating “all human qualities” of his voice and image.
The final video in canzona’s series is a mess of distorted colors and sounds; you can recognize from the motion that the original featured a person talking into the camera, but all individual characters and specifics have been lost, replaced by artifacts created by YouTube’s video and audio compression algorithms.

All 1,000 steps of the process — which took a full year — are available on canzona’s YouTube profile. The project is titled “I Am Sitting in a Video Room,” and it’s inspired by an audio art project recorded by composer Alvin Lucier more than 40 years ago.

In 1969, avant-garde composer Lucier made an audio recording of a brief speech, then played the speech on the speakers and recorded that playback. He repeated this until the acoustics of the room caused some frequencies to overwhelm others more with each recording. The result was a recording that sounded more like a message from another dimension than a man’s voice.

Lucier’s work often focused on the natural, physical properties of sound instead of musical theory. YouTube’s canzona was inspired by Lucier’s work to create “I Am Sitting in a Video Room” — even the words that he speaks are similar to those in Lucier’s original work.

Each time you upload a video to YouTube, that video is compressed by YouTube’s servers so the file size becomes small enough to easily stream to web viewers. Image compression is achieved by recording only changes from one frame to another rather than all of the data in each frame, removing small differences in color that the human eye usually can’t detect while an image is in motion, and through other small modifications to the image. The idea is that these small changes will not result in any dramatic loss in quality to the untrained eye.

However, when you compress the same thing 1,000 times over, it’s like the old adage about making a copy of a copy — the changes pile on top of one another and the image is so corrupted that it becomes unrecognizable. The same goes for audio compression.

Behavioral Targeting Classifications Read Between The Lines

Understanding consumer intent and knowing how to meet consumer needs seem like the perfect combination to determine the type of ad to serve up in any given scenario. It could become the key that unlocks nirvana for companies tapping behavioral targeting.
A new technology not only provides information on Web site visitors based on how they might think and feel about any given topic, but also their intention, whether or not they will buy or sell, and when. OpenAmplify recently launched Ampliverse, which allows companies to create taxonomies that classify Web content based on their requirements. Knowing who, when, where and why help answer questions on what ads to serve where. While it might be easy to determine the person with a positive view about BMWs should see an ad, it's more complicated to assign a classification and respond to the request for an ad position somewhere on the publisher's site -- which could offer about 600 spaces suitable to run an ad for a car.
Making a classification is just as important as understanding the content. It helps to increase the accuracy of behavioral targeting decisions. Different classification opinions for products and services make it more difficult.
Another technology is the Georgia Tech search engine created by a doctoral student which relies, in part, on machines helping Web sites learn dialect and other vernacular to improve search experiences and performance when language for queries might become unclear or unorthodox.
So, what about integrating the technology in Ampliverse? Let’s say you wanted to determine what type of car a salesperson might sell someone based on what medical articles he reads online. Using taxonomies not only tells the API the content to serve up, but it describes the type of convertible to sell him. Both the understanding and classification provides the flexibility to define a universe. This technology is still young but it has a lot of promise.