Author and "personal brand" evangelist Dan Schawbel wrote a thoughtful piece about "Why you shouldn't brand yourself as a "Social Media Expert" on his blog, a mandatory read for anyone trying to figure out social media and giving themselves the title "expert" as they do it.

Read it here.

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If you've been following marketing circles on Twitter recently, you're likely to admit there's a lot of talk about social media in business communications. I can't count all the "10 tips for this", "Tools for that" tweets, or various miracle uses of tweet-related 2.0 apps that abound in the worldwide nest.

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The simple vanilla facts. A repost from an earlier blog post that disappeared (?), back by popular demand.

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An open letter to my Social Media Marketing group on the LinkedIn network, from group moderator Michael Crosson (a typical user, not a LinkedIn employee). If you're on LinkedIn and are using groups, this concernts YOU. You be the judge.

"Hello, everyone - I am using a new feature on LinkedIn to contact you about something very important to all of us - social networking. I'm sure you joined in order to find information and resources, get feedback and network with other people interested in Social Media Marketing.

But LinkedIn has just made some policy changes that have severely restricted what group managers can do and makes the functionality of this group much more limited.

What they have done:

1. Taken away my ability to send you the monthly email newsletter that I have produced in the past. I can no longer access the group's email list.

2. Taken away my ability to send you individual welcome letters or direct correspondence. I can't even view who is a member of this group, it is limited to seeing only 500, not the entire 15,000+.

3. Forced advertising onto profile and other pages - but the group managers do not profit. There is no revenue share. I don't make a dime from any of the work I put into LinkedIn. [Note from Ed: This is just like you creating a web page, and some company putting web banners on your page without you getting any money from the advertising. Cheap.]

4. By disabling the email list download, I now have ZERO visibility into group performance reports that I used to have through my email management system. I can't tell how many people are unsubscribing, how many undeliverable emails there are, etc. etc. LinkedIn has NO reporting capabilities whatsoever.

They claim they had to do this because some unscrupulous managers were building lists for spam. Their response is penalize all the legitimate group managers for the actions of a few bad apples. There are far better ways to deal with this issue.

I pride myself in moderating and managing this group to the best of my ability. For almost a year, we have grown at 25% a month. LinkedIn overall has grown almost at much. The fact is, it is groups like ours that makes LinkedIn successful. But now they are biting the hand that feeds them. My ability to interact and network with you as individual members has been completely hamstrung. This is the only way to reach you individually.

I URGE YOU TO TAKE ACTION AND VOICE YOUR OPINION. Ask them to rescind this heavy-handed and totally unnecessary tactic. Send an email directly to the Founder, Chairman and CEO of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, directly on his LinkedIn page: http://snipr.com/eke5g

Thanks for taking the time and for participating in Social Media Marketing. Let's keep growing and improving it, and that means growing and improving LinkedIn, too."

Comment away.

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(Thanks, Personal Branding Blog!)

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Scouring the web these days you can find a plethora of blogs, tweets and web sites on which marketing consultants tell you how to "optimize your campaign using social media", or how "Twitter can be a great complement to your integrated advertising campaign". And AdKrispies is no exception. The search for the next great way to market to consumers has spilled much digital ink.

But while this is great from a theoretical point of view, I still fail to see concrete applications of social media inside actual campaigns. Companies are still tip-toeing in social media and emergent communication, and on rare instances will you actually see an actual campaign that's entirely wrapped around social media.

I'm not saying I find this disappointing, but I'm honestly getting a bit fed off with the fact that the hunt for social media information seems to be more important than its actual application. People seem to be on a Twitter craze, posting and reposting everything they find on the matter.
As I mentioned before, blogs are eloquent on the matter. There are five to ten 2.0 social media startups sprouting everyday on the web, "helping me better connect to people and places".

Well, it seems the more I spend time getting connected to people, things and places these days, the less I actually see them. My time hunting for social media is taking too much time, and not generating enough money. If social media is going to be an important part of the communications business, well it should start acting as such.

Monetize, don't just theorize.

Edit: I personally congratulate the people at Skittles for coming up with their new website and its brilliant use of social media. Bold move, yet full of win.

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In my last essay about this subject I've introduced the possibility of the User Prerogative Factor, or UPF, as an important constraint to take in account when trying to monetize an existing online business or social media.

As a reminder, the UPF (high or low) is the notion that a user's web usage habits always override the value of a website's contents. Hence a previously free, high-UPF site before will be very hard to monetize, while a previously free, low-UPF site stands better chances.

Now, we're going to look at solutions towards keeping a low UPF, or in other words, we'll try to discover what could possibly get users to adopt your service without being able to own it -- the key to any successful online venture.

First, let's look at some of the motivations to use an online service:

- Self-improvement (possibilities of)
- Proximity (or convenience)
- Anonymity
- Connection (to communities)
- Entertainment
- Control (of actions, of information)

Now, once users have benefitted from any of these advantages for free on your website, the High UPF factor brought therein means it'll be quite hard to bring anything new on the site that would be offered in payable form, because you're already fulfilling the basic usage motivations of users with your service.

Now, two important steps towards a solution. First, you must:

- Examine current usage of your services by users, and extract some insights. For example (something that's close to me, in this case): Employers currently examine a job candidate's Facebook profile before hiring. That's a usage insight. How could Facebook take this insight, and monetize it?

- Turn to your userbase, and ask them what they think, what they do. Most online businesses spend tremendous amounts of money in research to come up with the next great idea to raise the value of their online service. Why do so, when they could just ask users what they want instead? If you have a community, use it. Chances are all your answers could be there.

Once you have two or three basic usage insights in hand, you have real precious info. You now have to find out how to convert these insights into products or services that raise web usage habits one notch up. Sounds hard? Nope. The thing is, you don't necessarily have to twist your brains to find innovation on the web: thousands of brilliant and revolutionary 2.0 startups abound.

The idea is to learn how you can integrate these ideas with your own, creating a whole new service. That's called a mashup, and it's the future of the web as we know it.

I strongly believe that, once we're passed the "scattering of innovations" that's standard currency on the web nowadays, we will witness the regrouping of these innovations inside broader integrated services. Facebook is free. Yellow-pages are free. Should an application that mashes Facebook and Yellow-Pages together be free? Would people pay for that? What's an acceptable value for such a service?

What's for sure, your new mashed-up service could certainly bring user interaction on your site to a whole new level. But still the question remains: will people pay for it? Which form should my new offer take? Should it be a freemium? Should it be subscription-based? Paid by advertising?

To be continued.

In the next article, we'll look at options to integrate payment into your new service. In the meanwhile, please comment on my essay at will, add your ideas, and don't hesitate to criticize!

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Summing things up, we've seen:

- Gathering insights from site usage;
- Gathering information from your community;
- Convert these insights into tools, products of services by blending in other 2.0 services: Mashing Up.

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"We're sorry, this content can only be viewed by residents of the United States".

Being in Canada, this is the phrase I got when I first tried to view Hulu.com content.

It's there because understandably, media moguls have signed agreements with Hulu to control distribution. They've known since the dawn of mass communications that eyes, or "views", have value.

Now a lot of web 2.0 startups have great community-building ideas, but fail when it comes to monetize the value of these communities. However, a lot of people in these communities would readily pay for the content if it brought a certain level of "value" to their eyes.

How can the two meet? Is it possible to bring the notion of pay-per-view in web 2.0 content? Would you pay minute amounts of money for viewing Facebook profiles? Would you charge people 99 cents to view your corporate Tweets?

Can something belonging to the information category be monetized in this web 2.0 era? Or is entertainment the only thing which holds real value on the web currently?

UserVoice (see below post) seems to have found a model in selling "subscriptions" to their service right off the bat, because the product they're offering provides ROI to its benefactor.
However, people giving feedbacks inside the application, aren't paid to do so: they're doing it voluntarily. This being said, they do get something back in the long run because they get free active participation in making something they're using much better.

Would they pay to provide the feedback? No. Could they get paid to provide their ideas and insights? Yes. In UserVoice's current model they're not, but still it doesn't mean that their feedback doesn't have individual value. That value is a notion in itself which was certainly used by UserVoice creators in evaluating the average cost of a UserVoice package.

Now, isn't content found within a web application like LinkedIn of equal value? Doesn't it provide you with ROI because of the contacts you make and the businesses you develop? So why isn't LinkedIn taking advantage of this and selling this service?

Is "eye value" an applicable notion to community-based services? Are there ways that can be found to monetize or otherwise generate return from this eye value, without ruining the authenticity and efficiency of the community itself ?

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Today's market is made of conversations.

Managing and participating in these conversations is not only a great way to build a relationship with the public, it's also a great way to help your brand or product innovate.

Discover UserVoice, "the fastest way to turn feedback into innovation" as they put it themselves, but moreover -- a damn brilliant 2.0 application.

What UserVoice does is very simple. It opens up a channel for people to give feedback on your company's product or service, offering ideas and improvements. Just like you had your own little private (or public) customer management tool.

The UserVoice creators put it this way (from the UserVoice website):

"On other projects we were left frustrated and overwhelmed when trying to grasp what our users really wanted. Unorganized inboxes and clogged ticket systems ruled the day. Forums were awash with duplication, user support was impossible to determine, and valuable ideas were lost in the shuffle."

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