Stardust Global Ventures

A while back Tom Foremski wrote a post called – Dirty Little Secrets: Social Media Is Terrible at Promoting Products.

I have thought about that and he’s right. Social media promotes social media, or to take it deeper, Social media is what companies use to promote themselves. But no one is successfully promoting a product with social media. What social media is doing is enabling communication.

Are Brands social? I don’t think so. We pay attention to brands because of cultivated credibility. People brands may be social, but typically by the time they reach recognizable brand status they are not nearly as social because they are too busy and bombarded, so people brands find the other people like them, and are social there. It no longer matters that they aren’t social because they have built enough credibility that WOM takes over and becomes all that matters. Even bad word of mouth rarely impacts them. Most treat that as sour grapes.

As a people brand grows, does social shifting happen where they no longer have to engage because the people who built and helped them now do all the ‘social’ for them? Is it asynchronous – where you, the brand, no longer have to be involved? I believe this to be the case.

Is the assumption that by having 100k + followers that you have then achieved such a state of brand identity you are no longer required to engage? How then do we maintain credibility? We don’t expect the products to jump off the market shelves at us as we walk through a store, why then should a people brand expect and get unconditional devotion? Do they now have whuffie, or karma to spare and other people perpetuate their brand for us?

I’d like to not confuse a Brand with Engagement. Engagement happens between people looking for something, be it friendship, products, or information, and those providing what we’re looking for. The best engagers are not the brands we already identify. Those brands have all become part of the old broadcast media mold. No, the best engagers are people who haven’t yet arrived. Hmmm, I wonder if that’s an argument for high turnover in social media? I think I’ll save that for another post.

Who of you have not heard some major brand tell you, “We listen and we respond”, only to ask a question and either get nothing in response, or get the canned response that they will respond as soon as possible but due to the massive number of requests it may take a while? Is this what we want from engagement? Can we even call this engagement? I think this is LAME!

What we want from engagement is a front facing contact, someone who is representative of the brand, not the brand, who will take the time to help us out. We don’t want someone identified as a brand because as soon as we identify a person as a brand, they have reached a status that defeats the purpose of the front facing person. A brand simply doesn’t have enough to give to that many people. Certainly not the engagement piece.

Brian Solis recently wrote the book, Engage: The complete guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web. I haven’t personally read this book, in part because I have not had an opportunity, but there is another piece to it. I don’t think Brian engages well, except with those in his immediate universe, and I find it incredibly difficult to get excited enough to buy a book that is supposed to teach engagement from someone who is now his own brand. Certainly Brian is successful, you really can’t argue that, but why is he successful when he doesn’t eat his own dogfood? I believe Brian is successful because he has reached that brand status that many wish to reach, and yet so few ever truly achieve. But reaching that status now means he is incapable of being a person and truly engaging the way most social media people engage – which illustrates my point.

This isn’t a piece on Brian, and I’d rather not make it about him which is why I’m only linking to his book, not to him on a personal level. He is merely an example of the big picture I’m trying to paint, certainly not the only example, just a good one.

Once upon a time most Brands paid attention, asking questions about how they could do better, or what they should do differently, or even how to make your experience better. Once they get to the royalty stage, the only thing that shakes a brand up is a need to combat bad press, in other words the need to defend themselves.

You are certainly capable of making up your own mind about all this. I just had some thoughts, and where better to put them than here?

On a final note I’ll end with something I saw on twitter just moments before posting this. Practice what you preach, better yet, don’t preach. Just practice!

Makes sense, don’t you think? If you aren’t living it, walking the walk so to speak, at some point people will notice.

Technorati Tags: Tom Foremski, Sheryl Breuker, Brian Solis, Personal Brand, Engagement,

Every parent, teacher, educator and administrator in the world should watch this video. Twice. Then they should have to take a test.

This is the single most compelling talk from the recent 140Conf.

Our kids ARE the foundation that we’re building the world on. We don’t need drones and workers. We need thinkers and doers. Achievers and explorers. We need to teach our children to create, collaborate, build and network.

We need to do it now!

Don’t just shrug this off. Watch it. Share it. Spread the word. And teach your children well. Then teach help mentor three other children.

Almost a year ago, I wrote about Ten Tremendous Twitter Ideas in Part 1 and Part 2. Here’s what I said about one idea:

Telemetry – That’s a broad brush sector, but let me provide an example or two for consideration. Consider the utility services we use – gas, water and electric. As children, most of us remember the meter reader who came around each month with a clipboard taking manual readings from the various meters. In the utility industry, these are called “consumption reads.” They’re vital to utility providers for billing purposes.

That method of reading utility meters has been obsoleted by technology. First meters were equipped with small radio transmitters that could send meter readings to a person walking down the sidewalk. This innovation led to increased efficiency. Meter readers were able to gather many more readings in a day. But this advance quickly moved from a handheld data collection device to something mounted in a vehicle. The territory a person can cover driving led to another huge efficiency increase.

Both these methods are very common today, yet they’re being rapidly obsoleted by the ideas of both fixed and wireless networking. By placing data collectors on utility poles, buildings, and other infrastructure, now meter readings can easily be gathered in real-time, using network technologies, for homes in a half-mile or greater radius. Today, two-way functionality in utility meters is an area of keen interest for utility companies.

This technology today uses combined technologies. For example, from the meter to the pole-mounted collector something like 900Mhz unregulated spectrum may be used. The collector devices then might use GPRS or 3G to send some upstream IP information to a network aggregation point. This requires the integration of cellular modem technology into the collector.

Since we’re talking about embedded chipset technologies, why put the expensive data radio in the collector device. Why not embed a cellphone chipset and enable an SMS-only account with the carriers. The utility sector wields termendous power with the carriers, but sadly they do not know how to flex their muscles very well. Cost reduction in an emerging technology using Twitter technology to transmit information that is not so critical it requires more costly networking. It’s simply utility utilization monitoring in very-near real-time, (VNRT).

Many telemetry and flow metering applications use simple text messages over a serial interface. In the information age, we can easily replace the old wired serial link with an SMS stream of tweets.

Of course the utility won’t want to use the public Twitter for this information stream. All that’s needs is some partnering and selling.building a custom infrastructure to support it. Voila, a revenue stream for a corporate Twitter product let’s call it ConEdTwit for sake of example using a massive utility company.

The other day I got am email message from Art Felgate about the first first
idea I listed and how he’s building a simple Sewage Lift Station
Alert.  The product also includes a built-in temperature sensor as
well as PIR motion sensor option.

The Microtel Tweet Alert is simply a portable cellular temperature alarm that tweets. It has passed FCC Part 15 Class B and is patent pending.  It joins the family of devices Microtel delivers.

Art told me:

I think the idea of using Advertiser-sponsored Tweets to subsidize the cellular costs could eliminate any monthly costs for the consumer. If our device detected a freeze condition at a vacant cabin, for example, the Tweet could include an Ad/coupon from Home Depot or a local hardware store. Most likely some HVAC equipment failed, so the ad could be relevant to the repair.

The City of San Francisco is accepting Tweets from citizens alerting staff to utility or road incidents. We think a device like ours could complement that effort by monitoring unseen areas/assets.

This past week, with the acquisition of Tweetie, there’s been quite a brouhaha about Twitter and developers/ The developer community that’s most visible is in a panic that Twitter will consume their market niche. They should be concerned.

Microtel, on the other hand, should not. This is a great example of developers and solution providers not looking to add value to Twitter’s existing services. That will always be a risky proposition.

Microtel is simply using the Twitter service for what it really is, an information delivery service. Yes, we could call it transport…a pipe…yes, plumbing.

I was tickled to get Art’s message, and I’m thrilled to see a company like Microtel leading the way into the next generation of what could easily become the next generation of smart devices. And the real value here is that, while Twitter is the transport of choice for the moment, these devices are using simple technology that could easily be flipped to use any number of similar services.

They can also be easily coupled into location based services to provide service maps via common mapping tools to deliver extensive monitoring tools over time.

Kudos to Art and Microtel. I hope you guys see great success with this and keep me posted. Congrats on demonstrating real-world creativity in implementing our evolving tools in new ways.