…a great post by Adrian Chan on consulting:

As service providers, we are in the business of facilitating change. Some of this is concrete, and takes the form of deliverables and “works.” But some of it is more ineffable — is process, communication, relationships, and understanding.

The contractor, faced with a new client opportunity, occupies a unique position. We are outside the organization yet soon to become a temporary resident. We are tasked with responsibilities (for which we are paid) and yet given a greater freedom of movement than employees. We have the capacity for driving change but our success is contingent on the organization’s flexibility. We have been hired based on reputation but are, in each and every new situation, given an opportunity to shape and move the client according to our own skills and abilities.

I choose independence because I enjoy it. I prefer the new and the fresh to the long-standing and ongoing. I am turned on by the challenge of unfamiliar people and problems, and I am drawn into the world when it is rich and complex. For me, contracting delivers the possibilities of the open, of the future, and of the ability to act as an agent of change.

Read more: http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2010/09/selling-the-invisible-the-art-of-the-expert.html#ixzz101Z6GSeP

I just switched the blog over from Moveable Type to WordPress…still fleshing out some of the minor features, but overall, an easy experience! Thanks to Bill Kern of Pixelgate.

So let me work this out in public a bit.

I want to develop and execute a social media plan on the cheap – for Long Beach Opera, where I’m a board member.

So I thought it’d be interesting to track what I’m trying to do, what I do, and how it works.

LBO is a small avant garde opera company based near me in Long Beach – but it has established an international reputation through it’s imaginative work.

The company is run on the coffee budget of the neighboring Los Angeles Opera, and we’re looking to find ways to broaden the base of people in the region who are aware of us, engaged with us, and who we can start out as ticket buyers and move up the ladder of involvement and support.

We have a very small staff and Board, so we need to find a way to do that which leverages our efforts as much as possible.

Obviously, I’m thinking a campaign that includes social media – but isn’t driven entirely by it – is the path that will get us where we want to go.

What are the goals?

To increase awareness of the Company in the region and in the arts community worldwide.

To bring people to our performances, and to advance our audience from ticket buyers to subscribers to donors.

How will we do this? Well for starters, here are the goals I’d start with…

Offering a window into the workings of the company and a connection to the artists who create the work.

Expanding the reach of the work that the Company does virtually (taking elements of performances, establishing themes and offering them online).

So let me work out some ways to do those things…
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Apologies to all for going dark.

I’m currently working with a client on an enterprise project, and they’re not excited about my blogging on related issues. Plus I have no time (shoemaker’s children problem). I’m working on that, and hope to be back online soon.
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I’m on the Board of the Long Beach Opera , and last week went to the premiere of Nixon In China (and did I mention that our final performance is on Sunday? You can buy tickets here…). For the first half of the first song, the guy sitting directly behind me was stage-whispering to his date. I turned to give him the imploring look, but he had his face buried in her ear, so I reached back and tapped his knee. He started, turned to me, and I gave him a finger to lips gesture. He cursed under his breath and told me to turn around or else.

Now I had a choice at this point. I could have argued with him or escalated further. Or, I could have let it go and accepted the fact that I’d gotten what I wanted – he wasn’t talking any more.

It’s a basic issue in interpersonal relationships and conflict – how am I going to react?

Looking back at the Nestle social media disaster, I’ve got to point out that while Nestle was the targeted victim of a deliberate attack, a big chunk of the damage was self-inflicted.

Read this thread:

Note the tone of the official Nestle representative.

Oil on troubled waters – or nitromethane on a fire?

Note below when I mentioned that in a crisis, almost all people get stupid. One form of the stupidity is to mirror aggressiveness. It’s a basic human trait; we bristle when people bristle at us.

Two kinds of people seem to have mastered this reflex – the spiritual (think Dalai Lama) and warriors.

I’ve had some acquaintance with warriors in my life (note that I’m certainly not claiming to be one…); one stayed at my house when teaching a Field Trauma class I’d put together. John Holschen used to teach Special Forces soldiers martial arts. It’s likely that given a bowling ball and a pair of chopsticks, he could kill everyone in any given room – think of him as a real-life Jack Bauer.

And he’s one of the gentlest, most unflappable, calmest people I’ve ever met. Seriously.

So when I have to decide whether to turn around and snarl at the jackass in the seat behind me or not, I’ve got a role model. And I sat silently and enjoyed the opera, and there was no confrontation – which looks a lot like victory to me.

When you’re dealing with your social media presence, keep that in mind.
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In giving my SMB social media talks, the topic of deliberate bad behavior always comes up.

“What keeps me from going on Yelp and trashing my competitor down the street?” is a typical question. Or “What if my sister-in-law writes a really nice review for me?”

My response is that we’re kind of living in the wild, wild west and that until some social norms grow up and we get marshals to enforce them people need to be prepared.

I talk about Jeff Jarvis’ “Dell Hell” posts that triggered massive waves that hammered Dell…but I talk about Jeff as the pebble that unleashed the avalanche – not as a ‘community organizer’ mau-mauing the corporations.

I’ve talked with friends about “social DDoS” attacks, where a few thousand people could swarm a social site and in effect trash the community there – I imagined it as a tool Russian or Indian hackers would start using against corporations for money, political opponents would use against each others’ campaigns, or activists pushing business or government targets to change.

And now Greenpeace is using Nestle’s social media presence to attack Nestle for its consumption of plantation-grown palm oil.

Check out Nestle’s fan page on Facebook…

Regardless of the merits of the underlying case (I have no clue), Nestle is doing a – horrible – job managing the outbreak on Facebook, and in general seems to back on its corporate heels on this.

So what does this mean?

A few critical things for every business out there.

1. Be Prepared

First, just as you should be prepared for any other kind of disaster (supplier failure, selling damaged goods, embezzlement, fire, flood, or earthquake) you now need to be prepared for social disasters as well…

…these could be triggered by competitors, by personal enemies, by activist groups looking to make a point. They could be triggered by a misunderstanding that explodes in your face, or you could get caught in the backwash of an attack on your biggest vendor or customer.

What do you do about this?

Well, it happens that in my real life I study crises, from the intimate scale to the global. I’m a kind of preparedness fiend, and believe that it’s critical to be able to respond to what the world deals you.

And there are a lot of lessons to be learned here from real-world crises.

2. When it happens, you’ll get stupid.

The first is that most people’s thinking gets shut off when a crisis happens. The higher functions of judgment and perspective are the first to go. That’s why planning is so important.

Because you can think clearly about crises before you’re in them. Which is why you should do at least some thinking before the crisis happens.

3. Make a plan.

What should a plan be? That will vary widely by your scale, resources, and degree of desired control. It could be a set of three-ring binders that you rehearse once every six months. Or it could be a 3 x 5 card pushpinned to the wall next to your desk. Both extremes will have some common points:

For starters, know what you’ll do if you need help. Identify the appropriate responders – whether Facebook’s customer service group, a local social media expert who you trust, a global agency with social media capabilities – whoever is appropriate to the scale and domain of your business.

Next, define who will do what. Most companies I know delegate actual social media presence to the young…and unwise. That’s not great for a variety of reasons, but when you get in trouble – go read the Nestle Facebook threads – it can lead to disaster. Senior, authoritative voices need to step in.

How do you deal with an angry mob online? Much like you’d deal with an angry crowd in the real world. Engage, listen, defuse. Seek third parties to balance the discussion. set boundaries on behavior, not content – and aggressively police behavior while making it clear that you’re not policing content.

4. What’s the wrong thing to do?

Hunker down, deny, get a megaphone and broadcast denials.

Doing it right doesn’t mean that you’ll calm the waters completely. But you should be able to split the reasonable parts of the crowd from the unreasonable, and show the unreasonable as being – unreasonable and thus less attractive.

5. What should Nestle have done?

Well, first of all, as soon as the objections (to the farming process that is used to harvest the palm oil they use in their products) were publicly raised, they should have researched them and developed articulatable defenses.

This is a critical step. There’s a famous military theorist named John Boyd, who talks about guerilla warfare in ‘Patterns of Conflict.’ On slide 18, he says:

Action:

Undermine guerilla cause and destroy their cohesion by demonstrating integrity and competence of government to represent and serve needs of the people – rather than exploit and impoverish them for the benefit of a greedy elite.*

Take political initiative to root out and visibly punish corruption. Select new leaders with recognized competence as well as popular appeal. Ensure that they deliver justice, eliminate grievances and connect government with grass roots.*

*If you cannot realize such a political program, you might consider changing sides.

It’s a critical lesson for this situation – if you can’t articulate a clear defense against the claims being made against you – don’t defend yourself, change. Explain how you’re changing, when it will happen, and what it will look like.

Again – I don’t know enough about Greenpeace’s charges against Nestle to begin to know whether they are defendable or not.

What would a defense look like? Credible ecologists talking objectively about the impact of the farming techniques, with facts in support. Workers on plantations talking about the economic impacts of the available jobs. Things like that could be credible arguments – if true and defendable.

If not? Then Nestle should explain how in the near future they will be certifying their growers, or replacing the product with another that has lower impacts.

Each business out there should know what the likely problems will be. Are you a restaurant? Did someone’s reservation get missed? For their anniversary dinner? And when you eventually seated them, they got food poisoning?

Now – while you’re calm and not facing a mailbox full of hostile emails – list the four or five ‘most likely’ disasters that could lead to a social storm. How would you reply to each of them? Make some notes, and at 1am when you’re looking at a Facebook fan page full of vitriolic comments – those notes might give to a first step into solving the problem.

It is kind of the wild, wild, west out here in social media world. And that means that for a while you need to learn to be a peacekeeper.

Just remember that in the real Old West they did a lot more talking than they did shooting…
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A great, smart video from the UK (h/t Gerard VanderLeun)…watch the whole thing.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – SMB that thoughtlessly adopt the big business strategies of personalization and outreach in social media may or may not be doing themselves a favor.

In today’s WSJ – ‘Entrepreneurs Question Value of Social Media.‘ (probably behind a paywall) It’s not that they’re Luddites…

Last year, social-media adoption by businesses with fewer than 100 employees doubled to 24% from 12%, says a survey released in January of 2,000 U.S. entrepreneurs from the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business and Network Solutions LLC, a Web-services provider in Herndon, Va.

Meanwhile, a separate survey of 500 U.S. small-business owners from the same sponsors found that just 22% made a profit last year from promoting their firms on social media, while 53% said they broke even. What’s more, 19% said they actually lost money due to their social-media initiatives.

Here’s my old Slideshare deck on the topic…
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So let’s be clear – all media companies are struggling as both the basic models they operate under (online and offline) are challenged, and as the economy means they no longer have the cushion of good times.

Let’s look at two responses to the problem.

The LA Times ran an ad that wrapped the front page for the film Alice In Wonderland; that was controversial, but what made it deeply controversial is that the ad was designed with copy and font to look like the Times’ front page…with an ad layered on top of it.

It’s eye-catching to be sure, and the Times supposedly got well over a half-million dollars for it.

But it cost the Times something as well.

Robert Niles, a former journalism instructor at USC commented on replacing the front page with ads stating, “It’s a pretty dangerous road to go down for any news organization to actually sell advertising that covers up your news reporting. It really shows a lack of respect for the audience and a lack of confidence in your editorial product.”

Worse, it leverages the actual credibility of the Times – the logo, type and headlines – to make them a part of the ad experience itself.

The Times has done this before.

And while it’s a nice hit, and helps “keep the doors open” as publisher Eddie Hartensen said – how much does it drain the social capital of the Times to do this?

How would we know? Well, we might look at circulation rates, which are falling faster for the Times than for its peer papers (3Q 2009 – 11.1% for the LAT as opposed to 7.3% for the NYT and 6.4% for the Washington Post).

By running ads like this, the Times treats its readers with contempt – they are eyeballs to be sold, rather than an audience to be cultivated.

Let’s take a (much smaller) counterexample.

Ars Technica is a moderate-sized geek website (about 850K uniques/month per Compete) that realized they had problems with their readers’ ad-blocking software.

The technology site Ars Technica has a tech-savvy group of readers, of which about 40 percent have installed ad-blocking software in their web browsers. That’s a plugin that allows you to avoid seeing most ads on a site. The financial consequence for Ars is “devastating”, editor-in-chief Ken Fisher explained in a post. Ars sells ads based on impressions, not clickthroughs – which means it takes a big financial hit because of browsing habits of its users.

On Friday evening, Ars tried an experiment: Readers running ad blockers got a blank page instead of the story they intended to read. The move was a technical success, but caused an uproar (and confusion) among users. In hindsight, Fisher told me, the site’s experiment in retribution was the “wrong approach,” causing confusion among many readers.

So they took a step to protect and grow their revenues and screwed up.

What happened next?

But the experiment still generated positive returns for the site’s bottom line. Fisher wrote a lengthy post on Ars (similar to many the site has run before) about its goals and why ad blocking was a big problem for the site:

My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love. I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the son of the devil. It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content. It can also put sites into a real advertising death spin.

And since Saturday, Fisher has received about 1,200 emails from users saying they had whitelisted the site – meaning they had told their ad-blocking software it was okay to show Ars’ ads. Based on Ars data from IP addresses, 25,000 users whitelisted the site in a 24-hour period – evidence that the goodwill the site has built up with its audience could be converted into user acts of generosity.

So Ars Technica took a stand – but explained it to its audience and explained that revenue is critical to the site. They treated their audience as partners and adults – and in return, got a significantly positive response from them.

The LA Times apparently lost 100 subscriptions over the Alice ad, and the only commentary about it is on the Reader’s Representative page, which simply notes the consternation the ad caused, and leavens it with “but we have to’s.”

I don;t think the response from the Ars Technica readers was generosity – it was self-interest. They wanted to keep reading the site, and if it takes removing ad-blocking software, many of them were willing to do so.

Why is it that we can’t imagine the LA Times treating its readers in the same way as a medium-sized technology blog? What would that look like – and how would it work??

(With apologies to the used-to-be and now-is-again artist Prince)

I was talking to a potential client last week, and was getting pushed back because their current social media efforts aren’t doing much for them. In fact, they are pretty negative. They have added comments to articles and whitepapers on their website, and to be generous the comments are horrible.

Not just horrible as in mean to the brand, but a snakepit of trolldom, angry ad hominem and content-free commentary.

“See!” they tell me. “We put the comment system up, and look what happened!”

Here is where I mentally bang my head against the conference table.

“Look,” I explain. “What’s the difference between an alley in Beverly Hills and an alley in Compton?”

Blank look.

“No tagging on the buildings in BH. Why? because it’s obvious that the people in change care. When graffiti goes up, it’s gone the next day. The homeowners actually use the alleys and the police actually patrol them.

In Compton? Not so much. Which is why taggers are free to do their worst.

When you put up a comments system and walk away, you’re creating Compton.”

“So how do I create Beverly Hills?”

“Participate!” Participate in your own discussion forums. Make every author who writes something agree to go to the forums and engage at least twice a day. Make it part of their job.”

Because if you’re setting up forums and walking away, you’re just creating unmonitored back alleys where people are going to feel free to express their worst attributes.

Don’t do that.

For some tips on how, see this post.
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