Storify is a new company that focuses on curation. Curation is the practice of group online content together in a valuable way for your readers or community. I am very impressed with this app in my initial usage. You can check out a quick “story” that I put together for interesting B2B social media articles.

While the app is still in beta, you can request and invite. I will be back with future posts to look at this and other curation apps deeper in the future, but expect this to be a major trend in online marketing in 2011.

Brands in Public Template.

Seth Godin has launched a new effort to provide public pages for brands called “Brands In Public” Can offical public brand pages work? Is that even what people want?

I think customers want interaction from brands and that they don’t need official pages to make that happen. Expections are shifting and they want brands to come to them. It seems like Seth is working on an outdated idea…

The video below is courtesy of our friends at Google that discusses how to test Web sites using Google Web site Optimizer.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note: This post was written prior to Facebook’s formal announcement detailing which data sets will be accessible by third party developers.

The web is flooded with news everyday, most of it trivial, but every once in a while we get a day that is a true game changer. Today is that day for all marketers. Today Facebook will announce changes to its API allowing third-party developers to access user submitted information from Facebook for use in their applications. You are asking yourself right now, what do geeky API calls have to do with marketing? Everything.

Now that you have read my previous post about API marketing, I hope that you are beggining to see the implications of Facebook’s announcement. Facebook with more than 200 million users is the largest social network on the Internet. API data has gone primarily under the radar until now because most applications offering APIs had much smaller user-bases. Twitter is the application that made API’s popular.  It has more than 3,000 applications built on its API but it only has around 13 million users. Facebook in addition to having a huge amount of users also has a vast variety of data from text, images, videos, etc.

Opening The Walled Garden

Until this most recent announcement of API changes Facebook as been considered a walled garden in which you had to be a member logged into Facebook to share information and once logged out the information was not accessible. Companies have had access to most user submitted information.  This includes information on sites like Twitter, Digg, message boards, and niche social networks thanks to tools like Google Blog Search, Filter Box, Radian6 and other tools built to monitor user submitted data. However, Facebook and its mountain of data remained the kid by itself standing in the corner.

Why is Facebook doing this?

Understand that these changes to its API offers Facebook the greatest potential for monetizing of their platform. Their has long been discussion about the lack of effectiveness of advertising in social networks and Facebook knows this. Lets be clear, really brilliant people work at Facebook, they know what they are doing. They understand the true value they have is in the data not eyeballs. I have said this before but it is worth repeating.

The social web economy is about data and relationships relationships not about eyeballs and impressions.

That being said this API announcement is the first step for Facebook to monetize its data. For example, Twitter users that use desktop applications are currently allowed 100 API requests per hour. Sending a tweet, looking up a profile, doing a search, are each one API request. Facebook could potentially set a free level of API request activity and then charge developers for additional API requests. This is a simplified monetization strategy but could be the foundation for the approach they take.

Implications For Brand Marketers:

If you are a marketer, your job changed today.  Today Facebook gave you the keys to a luxury sedan of consumer insight and data. Most commentary surrounding Facebook’s API changes will be detailing what developers can do with the new API. Their will also be discussions about the validity of building a business on another company’s platform. This post though is for marketers, especially the non-geek marketers, the people that may not even know what an API is.

Marketers have spent years trying to determine what their customers want and what triggers actually lead a consumer to by a product. This has been done through market research, focus groups, surveys and a host of other methods used to collect customer data. Today the social web has flipped that process because now consumers are freely submitting their own information onto the web and the organizations that can effectively collect and analyze it and use it to build positive relationships with consumers will be successful.

Facebook has opened the spigot on the web’s most robust source of social consumer data. Here are some examples of how this data could be used by brand marketers:

• Incorporate Facebook data into existing social media monitoring systems for added insight
• Company’s like Ford that have dealers that sell their products could build applications that sort by location consumers talking about buying or needing a new car and what they are looking for. This information could be used to provide insight to the dealer on local customers as well as their opinions of dealer’s advertising and marketing.
• Create an extensional of current CRM sales tools that incorporates individuals Facebook updates and data into their CRM profile in real-time. This could be used to make more relevant sales calls, meetings and help build relationships.
• Aggregate and display how consumers are currently using your product to showcase uses to potential consumers from a trusted third-party.

Above are only some quick thoughts and more possibilities will be known once Facebook releases its updated API documentation later today. If you are a marketer you must realize that user generated data is key to future consumer insights and building brand advocates. Today Facebook has handed you something you have long been looking for…

As the social web grows up, their is a lot of discussions on making money, but not a lot of specifics discussed. Better yet, few examples of companies innovating to increase sales in new ways. E-Commerce is nothing new to the web, but has the web gets social it to has to change.

I stumbled across a great example of a using wisdom of the crowds and the spirit of competition to promote and sell products. Amazon, an e-commerce retailer who has long been know for innovation and its willingness to try new things has started something new with its MP3 download service and its use of Twitter.  If you take a quick look at the image that leads into this post, you will see that Amazon MP3 has started using its Twitter feed differently. Until recent the service’s Twitter feed was only a listing of its daily music sales. This week that changed when they announced #bandbattle.

For #bandbattle Amazon picks two bands and then has followers tweet @ replies for the band they like the most. The band with the most replies will have its records put on sale on Thursday by Amazon.   I love this approach to using competition to determine special sales and the big upside is that with Twitter’s ability to spread word-of-mouth makes it a great promotion platform for the bands. I am not sure if Amazon is taking the loss on the sales, but if it is, it should work to partner with bands for the sales so it can reduce losses as it is providing marketing support.

Check out which band is getting the most votes.

Can this approach work for all companies? Probably not, but is can certainly extend well beyond the music business.

What do you think?

The beauty of the self publishing platform that is the Internet is that most bloggers and contents creators start out at zero: 0 readers, 0 posts, and 0 everything. This is also the major reason that many blogs don’t get thousands of readers. Blogging, writing, and hell even life is about expectations. When you right blog posts that you think no one will read, they most likely will suck and you will be inclined to write less often then you really need to inorder to build an audience.

What If You Had 10,000 Readers?
If writing for no one makes you a crappy writer then shouldn’t writing for thousands make you better? Yes, it is all about competition and exceptions. First you need to make sure that you really do care about what you will be blogging, vlogging, tweeting, etc. about, because if you don’t care you will be worse then boring.

What if you:

• pretended that  10,000 people we going to read whatever it is you are writing about. Would that change what you were writing?
• asked yourself “is this really interesting, would I read it?”
• made it a competition i.e. have X number of readers in 30 days. X number of subscribers in 90 days. etc.
• asked yourself “is this really how I sound? Am I covering up the real me because I think people don’t want to hear it” Stop doing that NOW

You Don’t Have To Know It All
Ignore people that talk condescendingly about blog SEO, blogrolls, and all of the other things that you MUST know about blogging. Honestly those things are really nice to do and can help a lot, but trying to learn it all at once will be confusing and stop you from actually creating compelling content. You will figure it out, it really isn’t that hard. We all want it to be cool, so that we can be cool, but the truth it is good writing which is nothing new…

In the toady’s 30 second attention span world, we spend much of our time asking each other what is next. In marketing it was the web, then search, then blogging, then social media, but what really is next? Last week David Armano, made a big announcement that he was going to join Jeff Dachis and Peter Kim at the Dachis Corporation to focus on social business design. After reading David’s post it spurred me to write a post I have been kicking around in my head about the “future” of marketing.

Companies have always needed a platform to communicate with their customers. In the past that platform has been many things: media, billboards, advertisements, blogs, fan pages as well as a a host of others that I am forgetting.  Social media has been a breakthrough for many organizations because it removed the gatekeepers from the marketing equation and allowed them to publish their information directly to their customers on their own schedule.

In a world without media gatekeepers where does marketing go next?

API’s Are The New Marketing Platform

If I was a CMO, I would take some of my marketing budget from traditional media buys and creative work and use it to hire a small group of extremely talented web developers that have experience using API’s to develop simple and easy to use web applications. API stands for application programming interface and it serves as a platform for web applications to interact and share information with other applications. A practical example of this are Twitter clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic, though they reside on a desktop, they use the Twitter API to send and receive tweets, which means that you don’t have to go to your Twitter.com page to use your account.

The future of marketing is about companies developing useful applications for their customers that extend web services that the customers are already using. This replaces the current model which is to use web applications to communication with customers.  The problem with current social media marketing is the noise. A company is one of thousands, sometimes millions of users and it is easy to get lost. Developing applications via API’s provide a way for companies to break out of the crowd and at the same time create value for customers.

Brands will need to become conduits that facilitate consumer communications instead or interrupters that intermittently drop in advertisements.

Imagine if Pepsi had built the first great Twitter desktop application instead of  Tweetdeck or Twhirl and millions of people were using the company’s application to use Twitter. This transforms Pepsi’s role from a company that is trying to communicate amongst millions of Twitter users, to instead providing one of the handful of major applications used by millions.

I mention Pepsi, because they are a company that has began to create web applications using APIs. An example of this is the Pepsi Zeitgeist which used the Twitter API to aggregate relevant tweets at SXSW 2009.

Today’s economy is putting web startups in difficult positions, the demands have never been higher to produce great applications with less development staff.  This provides a golden opportunity for brands who have money to spend in the form of  marketing budgets. If brands use a portion of their marketing budget to hire API developers then they have the power to partner with developing web companies to help them improve how consumers use the service while in tandem changing consumers’ perception and awareness of the brand.

Marketing As A Service

Developing third party applications based on API’s is the extension of an idea that has long been kicked around often referred to as “Marketing As A Service”. Brands have been trying to execute on the idea of marketing as a service on the web, but normally it is with small stand alone applications that are developed as widgets or are a component of a campaign microsite. This isn’t a bad approach, but developing and extending existing web services through API’s offers much more opportunity. Plus these services already have a predefined and organically growing user-base.

The ROI of API’s

What is the ROI of this? The biggest appeal of using API’s as a marketing platform is that brands have a mountain of data at their disposal. Instead of knowing that a customer came to a sales page, brands can know what type of information customers are interested in, how they like to communicate with their friends, keywords that cause them to take action, and countless other data points that would render the best market research obsolete.  Data is just the beginning. The long-term brand awareness that is driven from positive user experience can build stronger brand advocates.

Flip It And Reverse It

Developing on the APIs of existing web services is only the beginning. We live in a world that now has expectations of open and available content. The natural extension of this will be for companies themselves to release their own API’s to allow their customers to create and develop applications. This goes against most current thoughts on inbound web marketing, but understand that empowering customers with information, empowers word-of-mouth marketing. This approach applies to all businesses not those that are web-based, but rather anyone who has a web-based tool or component for their organization.  Obviously this concept will have many hurdles for some organizations, especially from a legal standpoint.

Not A Replacement

Developing on API’s and using other marketing as a service approaches is not a replacement for social media marketing or even traditional marketing, instead it offers the ability to provide consumer value in a more meaningful and complementary way then other current forms of marketing.  It would be difficult to leverage API’s as a marketing platform if brands did not have other traditional marketing resources to help drive exposure and users to the applications that have been developed on the APIs.

Looking Back At The Future

The ideas discussed in this post aren’t new ones, they have been at the heart of successful marketing, the Web simply provides a cheaper and faster way to execute these ideas. In the way that software as a service (SAAS) businesses are changing the software industries business model and increasing profitability, marketing as a service on the web has the same opportunity to improve ROI and change the industry.

I challenge you to think about the roles APIs have for your customer-base. Would this approach work for you? Do you think this is the future? If not, what is?

All around the social media industry their is a constant complaining about people that call themselves “Social Media Experts” or “Social Media Gurus”. Most of this discussion centers around the fact that most people calling themselves these titles know very little about social media. That is the wrong thing to focus on. We should be focusing on the bigger issue.  NONE of us should want to be social media experts. This is not a good long term goal. It doesn’t scale. All media is quickly becoming social, meaning the idea of a social media expert is far to general.

What should we want to be then? I contend that we should look to fill a niche within the broader social media industry. Some folks should focus on creating great written content, while others could peruse web audio and video distribution.   Or you could want to become an expert in the social web’s application on a particular niche like B2B.  Regardless what your goals are, I can tell you the if you say you are a social media expert that will be a quick assurance to me that you don’t know what you want to do.

I have some additional thoughts on this topic in this video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Agreed? Think I am crazy?

Don’t shoot me. I know you and everyone else on this planet is sick of hearing about Twitter every time they turn on the TV or the computer. Twitter is so over-saturated and exposed that it is hard not to be completely fed up with the frenzy. However, with this frenzy has come a lot of new interest in Twitter and I have received many questions asking: “Why is Twitter so great?” “What makes it better than my blog or Facebook?” “Why do I need yet another service?”

Twitter isn’t better than any other service nor can it make miracles happen, but it has a killer component that goes under discussed and remains the primary reason everyone is plugging their twitter username. Twitter is public word of mouth. Read that last sentence again.

Individuals and marketers have always sought out the promotion holy grail that is word-of-mouth marketing.  It does have its limits though. In the pre-digital age word-of-mouth was limited to public conversations and then facilitated on a larger scale by media outlets. As we got digital this all changed. E-mail forwarding become a very popular word-of-mouth method that users adopted from e-mail.

The problem with e-mail and even social networks is that the conversations that happen there are private. Limited to the people who get or are passed a long the e-mail. Or in the case of something like Facebook limited to who you are friends with.  Twitter changed this.

Twitter is limited by nothing, because all conversations are public (unless you choose to make a profile private). A conversation I have with my friend Wayne on Twitter is a free-for-all. It can be “heard” by people following each of us, people looking at the public time line, people using twitter search, people using Google or someone using one of the 2,000 applications built on the Twitter API. This openness makes makes for a full-on word-of-mouth sprint where everyone’s data is competing for attention.

This is why P Diddy wants to be on Twitter, not just for the 300,000+ people that follow him, but for the millions he reaches because of Twitter’s publicly sprawling data.

Looking at the traditional media world, it seems like the sky is falling. Newspapers and other traditional print publications are closing or great reducing budgets and staff. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, we have seen these changes coming for awhile, they are just now starting to arrive. Does this mean that newspapers and other forms of traditional media will no longer exist? No, the will continue to exist in a different form, because our society needs these type of media watchmen.

The evolution of the traditional media business is impacting more than just newspaper and magazine newsrooms, the decline of traditional media can be felt in the nervous vibrations that are coming from most public relations agencies around the world. For years the bread and butter of public relations professionals has been media relations. Pros have long been judged on their ability to get a “big hit” in mainstream consumer publications. While companies still need exposure and media attention, the vehicles to getting it are quickly changing.

The truth is that media relations professionals should be one of the groups best equipped for the changing media landscape. Media relations professionals have always succeeded by building great relationships, creating value and interesting content for media outlets. In addition that have had to be skilled in educating journalists in a clear and concise manor. This skills transition perfectly to the user generated media landscape that is growing daily around the world.

It is my contention that to be successful in the 21st century that public relations professionals have to become better listeners and more over MUST become creators and curators of valuable information. Meaning that PR people regardless if they work at an agency or in a corporation need to counsel their clients that the communication model has changed. Gatekeepers are breaking down and companies now have the ability to talk directly with their consumers through user generated content and search engines. The question that companies must ask themselves is what do they have to say that their customer wants to listen to.

I am not going to stand here and preach that the world of top-down messaging and official legal statements is over, because that would be a load of crap. Instead I am saying that companies can say what ever they want and if a company spews worthless crap information then no one will listen and the company will become irrelevant.

That is why now more than ever PR people have to become consumers of information. They have to have their finger on the pulse on the type of information their clients customers are consuming to understand how to best make the client relevant. PR pros have to become better storytellers and need to serve as aggregators for information around a topic or industry and as aggregators PR pros will be able to incorporate the clients story in to the overall thoughts of the industry.