I'm taking a break from packing for the Second Bi-Annual Integral Theory Conference in Concord, California to write this post.   I wasn't originally going to attend, but my friend and fellow Meetup Organizer Marc talked me into it.   After bargaining with the summer vacation and budget committee (i.e. my wife) and committing to attend, I began thinking about all the possibilities for connecting.  So in the interest of sharing and learning, here are the ways I hope to expand, deepen and strengthen my network during this trip.

1) Re-connect.  This one is easy.

My first step was to send an email blast to all of my fellow alumni of the JFKU Integral Theory program.  "Who is attending?" I asked.  I was pleased to hear from a several friends that I had met in 2006-2007.    These are people with whom I shared 80 hour weeks, wee hours, brain-bending assignments and passionate discourse.  It will be a tribal reunion for us.

2) Cross-connect.  This one is all about exploring new and emerging communities that you may be part of ... but didn't know it.

When I realized that there are likely to be a lot of people who are running Integral Theory Salons, Meetups and Study Groups in their local communities  (like me) , I decided to try to find this newly emerging Proto-tribe (i.e. a Tribe that has potential, but that doesn't yet exist.)   Maybe we can share ideas, practices and pitfalls?  Maybe I can form new friendships?     I reached out to some Salon leaders and to the Conference Organizers.    Sean Esbjorn-Hargens, Conference Organizer (and Integral teacher extraordinaire) returned my request with good news.  They will put a flyer in the registration packets - and reserve some table space during one of the lunches to connect this tribe.  I can't wait!

This worked so well, that I decided to try with another cross-connection.   How about people from my Holacracy (Dynamic Steering for Corporations) group?   I've met many of these people online - and a few in real-life from earlier training, but it would be great to connect in person.   I posted a request on the forum for Holacracy Practitioners.  Lo and behold, a dozen or so will be attending!   Brian Robertson, founder and CEO of Holacracy, took up the reins and arranged a dinner.  Very cool!

3) Deep-connect. Strengthen your tribe at home.

I reached out to my own, local Integral Philly group.    We had a Meetup to discuss potential topics.  We decided that, all things being equal, I should try to attend topics that helped us to understand where the economy and culture is heading?   What role does Sustainable business practice and the triple-bottom-line play in our future?   Is a new generation of Conscious Capitalists emerging who will swap some profit for longer term and broader aspirations?

We've set our next Meetup up as a debrief by Marc and me.    Hopefully, this approach will help us deepen our community even though only a couple of us are attending.

What techniques have you used when traveling to a conference or new location to expand or strengthen your tribal connections?    Drop us a line below and share your secrets.

(Photo Credit: Bekaboris.com)

"Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment" (2010 published by John Wiley & Sons)  lays out a solid strategic framework that covers all the Social Media bases.   He makes generous use of the thinking from other thought leaders  and their blogs, tweets and reports.    As a result, its not a bad way to get an insider's tour of the technorati of the Social Media Marketing tribe.

Here are the kinds of takeaways you can expect, with a sample from each of the book's nine chapters.

Chapter 1: Getting Focused. With a focus on the big three (increased revenue, lower cost and improved customer satisfaction), Sterne leads you through the kinds of questions you need to ask to make your goals truly useful to your business.  With his tongue-in-cheek example of analysis around the question "Are fat people lazy?" ,  he shows how discipline and being crystal clear is critical to useful analysis.

Chapter 2: Getting Attention - Reaching Your Audience. This is where Jim Sterne's years of experience as a sales and marketing pro really shine.  He marries the importance of brand recognition with the world of Social Media reach metrics.   Using models from a couple of industry leaders (Avinash Kaisuik, Charlene Li and Jason Stamper) he outlines some ways in which you can measure the effectiveness of your reach across blogs, Twitter and Facebook Apps.   The chapter wraps with a cautionary tale of why the numbers from different tools don't usually match up.  Learn to live with it.

Chapter 3. Getting Respect - Identifying Influence. How valuable are your followers?  Sterne dives into a discussion of the different kinds of influencers in your Social Network and how they drive conversations.   This is a great chapter to unpack questions about authority, impact and empty metrics.

Chapter 4. Getting Emotional - Recognizing Sentiment.  As a student of Artificial Intelligence in the 80's, this was a particularly interesting chapter to me.   Sentiment Analysis represents the leading edge of Social Media analytics, but is also fraught with the same challenges AI systems have suffered from for decades.   Sterne surveys the latest and greatest thinking in this space and explains the pitfalls of having computers decipher the Tweets:

"My crab cakes were bad" from "Skied moguls all morning. That mountain is BAD!"

Chapter 5. Getting Response - Triggering Action. Some very helpful thinking around getting responses that cover Social Bookmarking and the Engagement Food-chain model lead us to understanding of whether our Social Media efforts are generating productive activity.

Chapter 6. Getting the Message - Hearing the Conversation. Sterne tackles the nature of the conversations taking place about your industry and your brand.  Ratings, reviews and recommendations  - and the tools that track them are covered here.   The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is becoming an industry standard in measuring customer satisfaction for its ability to predict future company success.   Sterne integrates the NPS gracefully into this chapter on listening through Social Media.

Chapter 7. Getting Results - Driving Business Outcomes.  Finally, we come to business outcomes and Key Performance Indicators.  Tying everything he's covered back to the goals discussed in Chapter 1, Sterne tackles the challenging topic of Social Media ROI (Sterne's short answer to this industry hot potato - Yes, you can measure ROI!).  Again, some wonderful frameworks are shared from industry experts including Lithium's model for measuring community health.  Good stuff.

Chapter 8. Getting Buy-In - Convincing Your Colleagues.   How do you get Social Media accepted in your organization?  Sterne dons the cape of the Change Agent and gives us a six step process, complete with a typology of managers we'll have to navigate to get our Social Media initiative recognized.

Chapter 9.  Getting Ahead - Seeing the Future. A perfect wrap to the book ends with a view towards where this might all be heading.  From patented mind-reading technologies to the Cluetrain-driven shift from business-focus to the consumer-focus,  this chapter had me scrambling for my closest search engine to learn more.

To be sure, Social Media is an exploding arena which our businesses and cultures need to examine and understand more fully.   We need a discussion about tribal marketing and connecting to audiences, we need conversations about good conversations and we need to keep our hearts open to generational differences within Social Media.  However, Social Media Metrics fills an important gap in our understanding of how to operationalize Social Media and begin working it into our daily business.

Have you read this book?   If so, I'd love to hear your impressions in our comment section below.    Please share any other Social Media business books that you think people could benefit from.

The premise behind this talk is that business people must become more multi-faceted to operate in today's Social Media driven world.   The age of specialization has come and  gone.  We are faced with the need to be anthropologists, psychologists, scientists and business people.

This talk was first delivered on May 13, 2010 to the Community College of Philadelphia, Corporate Solutions Group by Skip Shuda of  Team and a Dream.   It runs through the reasons why business people should care about Social Media, where it is heading and what we should do about it.  The meat of the presentation contains a framework for Social Media Strategy - as well as some case studies illustrating different objectives in Social Media.    We also touch on using teams to create your business Samurai... when you can't do it all yourself.

Lately, the idea of business tribes has been on my mind.  Two years ago, we experimented with "small business, small group consulting" where we coach 3-5 small businesses as a group.  The offering fell flat.  There were some good business conversations - and more than a few useful business tips... but not enough to justify the periodic meetings and commitment.  Why?

The group did not "Vibe".  The businesses had different models and were at different stages.  By default, we had to generalize the conversation to fit everyone - or cover topics that left some participants out.   Neither approach worked.

So, starting this week I'm experimenting with some friends on creating a "business tribe".   The businesses and their entrepreneurs are all of the same:

- Business stage - we specifically chose 3 companies at roughly the same stage of their business growth.

- Business model - they share the same basic product model, although some are B2C and others are B2B.  I'm wondering how critical that ends up being?

- World view - Used Spiral Dynamics to assign "memes" to candidate companies.  I think this might be a very important intangible to consider.

- Pursuing the same objective (to be selected by the tribe).  One of the members suggested this in our kickoff meeting.   I really like this since it gets everyone aligned around a common activity, but specific for each of their businesses.

So, do you agree with these "tribe building criteria"?   What would you add or change?   I'd love to riff on this with you!

(Photo Credit: from http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/life/entrepreneurs-university-resources-a-win-win-for-all-335985/)

Happy April 1st! Share a chuckle with us below - or with someone else somewhere else.

These are the typical answers I hear when I ask small business owners what they hope to accomplish through their use of Social Media.  I suspect, though, that they would have the same answer for just about any marketing investment I asked them about.

What do you hope to achieve by investing in social media, radio advertisting, paid search, attending networking events, running an workshop, building a new web site, renting an airplane banner at the beach ?

When asking my tribe about what topics they'd like to see in a Social Media workshop for Small Business, my friend Adam (also a SEO and business intelligence guru) asked about setting goals for small businesses with respect to their use of Social Media.

Ultimately, people want to know what return their can expect on their investment.  This is a big topic and one I've been listening to some smart people debate.  Some of  favorites are Erik Qualman's post and video on Social Media ROI.  Qualman asks, "What is the ROI on your phone?".

Before I move on from ROI, I have to include Olivier Blanchard's hysterical slideshare deck on Social Media ROI.

Blanchard's presentation shows that there are lot of ways to use Social Media to drive and improve engagement.   At the end of the day, that engagement will frequently drive sales and tangible returns.

But what happens in the middle with Social Media is a critical factor  in deciding what kind of Social Media Strategy a small business should employ.   In another post I outline our process for assigning channels to a Social Media strategy for a business.     A key factor in deciding which channels to use is the match between the business goals and the best uses of the channels chosen.

We put together a baker's dozen  of potential goals for a businesses Social Media strategy.   These goals fall into 3 categories:

1. Knowledge-centric goals are used to promote credibility and deepen a businesses's knowledge.
2. Relational goals are used to develop relationships with different constituents of a business.
3. Outcome Oriented goals are ones in which Social Media is more directly tied to an outcome.    These often have more of a fixed duration, a targeted message and a campaign structure.

Our framework is outlined below:

While detailing each of these "objectives" will take a bit more than I planned to spend on this blog post, I hope it provides you with an idea of how more specific objectives can be gleaned from a thoughtful conversation about Social Media strategy for your business.

It opens up the conversation about how you might use Social Media based on the unique signature of your business.  For example:

• a copier and printer business might be interested in how they can use Social Media to provide excellent Customer Service.
• A software development company might want to share their Point of View on a new application framework, establishing themselves as thought leaders in the process.
• A restaurant might be focused on promoting an upcoming event.

Every business may have multiple goals at different times in their business cycle.  Social Media is a powerful amplifier and tool for creating a business that resonates with your marketplace.   However, it is only a tool - and how you put it to use determines whether you have a "black hole" investment or a winnng formula to grow your business.

This framework is a work in progress.  What other goals and uses do you feel are missing from this "baker's dozen"?   Do you feel that any of  these are more effective uses of Social Media than others?   Let us know your thoughts!

Stephen M. Goodman is a partner in Morgan Lewis's Business and Finance Practice and has been with the firm since 1994. His practice, focused on corporate finance and acquisitions, is dedicated to fostering emerging growth companies in the region through direct work with clients and active involvement in the emerging growth community. As strategic counsel to startups in the technology and life sciences sectors, Mr. Goodman identifies companies with potential and then takes them from conception through product development, growth and beyond. Some of the companies he has nurtured include CDnow, VerticalNet, ICG Commerce, AirClic, ExcelleRx, and AANet.com.

BTW - please buy the Web Analytics 2.0 book if you have an interest in this topic.  Avinash is donating 100% of his income from this book to charity.  I would like to commend Avinash on this generous action and the oustanding challenge he provides to all of us to consider how we can pay it forward. 

The chapter on Social Media Metrics is called “Emerging Analytics: Social, Mobile, and Video”

In the first few pages, he provides an overview of how analytics have been impacted by the Social Web.   User Generated Content and off-site conversations are an essential part of our online brand experience.  He advocates that we need to think more about “Conversation Rate” than “Conversion Rate”.

Avinash dives deep into the options for tracking analytics.  He starts with Mobile analytics and describes the challenges of determining if your blog or content is being consumed on a mobile device.   He uses a tagging solution from PercentMobile in his blog, but mentions Bongo Analytics and Mobilytics as options.  This lets him track the amount of mobile traffic, devices used, networks, countries and mobile via WIFI.  He points out that the world of measuring mobile is just getting started, but will be crucial  if we are going to segment our data and understand what is happening properly.

Blog Analytics are tackled next.  Avinash advocates two metrics to measure “Raw Author Contribution”: posts per month and average words per post.   From there, he focuses on “Holistic Audience Growth” and discusses how you should use a measure of RSS subscribers to see how your blog is growing.   Reach will measure how often your content is accessed and “Conversation Rate” for blogs is measured by # of Visitor comments / # of posts.   He goes on to discuss the use of Technorati and Tweet Citations to measure your ripple effect.

Finally, he treats the cost of blogging by examining the expenses of Technology, Time and Opportunity Cost.   From there he examines the metrics of value including Comparative Value (blog valuation tools), Direct Value (monetizing through ads and affiliates), Nontraditional Value (savings on PR, offline ads) and Unquantifiable Value.   These factors can, arguably, be used to compute ROI for your blogging efforts.

With Twitter, he starts off with the basic tracking of growth in the number of followers and churn rate.  He then moves to “message amplification” in which the world of retweets is handled.   Pointing to tools like TwitterCounter, Retweetist and Retweetrank, he suggests that you find out which tweets are most effective with your audience.

Beyond these initial metrics, he starts to examine click-through rates for Conversion Rate and Twitterfriends for measuring Conversation Rate.   He wraps this section with a discussion of emerging Twitter Metrics including Engagement, Reach, Velocity, Demand, Network Strength and Activity.

The last section of this chapter tackles Video analytics.   While embedding tracking codes into player-specific modules is the way to get the most granularity, it is also IT-intensive.  He spends some time looking at YouTube Insights to provide metrics on any videos you place in your YouTube channel.   You can discover your top videos, regional data and attention throughout a given video.  [NOTE: - I discovered that this only works with videos that have a relatively high number of visits – in the thousands.]  This can help you identify which parts of your videos are most appealing to viewers.  You can also determine where your video has been embedded to measure the “viralness” of a video.

He wraps up the chapter by discussing the need to compute “Contextual Influence” or rather, the value of each feature relative to others.  Kaiushik is a big advocate of capturing “Voice of the Customer” to determine exactly why people are coming to and using your web site and other properties.   His answer to this problem is simple.  Ask them.  He advocates a tool called 4Q for on-site surveys.   You can also run A/B or multivariate tests to determine the preferences for certain material.

The chapter is filled with technical details, tools to support your analysis and insights into how you can take actionable steps in response to your collected data.

I hope that is a helpful overview that will allow you to decide whether this book might be helpful to your Social Media Analytics efforts.   Avinash tackles the topic of Social Media Metrics in his own blog in a lot more detail.

Have you implemented any Social Media metrics for your company?  Which ones are most helpful?   Please continue the conversation by commenting below.

Its not fair.  Especially to anyone who is expecting me to "show up" and contribute in the Social Media sphere.  But in fairness to me, I'm feeling inundated with "channels".

My brain grew up in the 1960s.  We had 1 telephone line per household and it took 30 seconds to rotary dial it.   I didn't see an email until the 80s.  I was taught that you should focus on a problem, not skip from one to the next to the next to the... or worse, do them all at once!

So I've been making a map to help me manage my Social Media channels.  I WILL be the master of my communication Destiny!  Soon.  Read on to hear my plan...

Recently, Valeria Maltoni (Twitter: @conversationage ) asked if people regularly prune their under-used social channels.   It sparked a short conversation between me (@skipshoe), @communimatrix and @conversationage.

Turns out that Colleen Wainwright is all over this.  She has her Twitter Policy page, complete with her philosophy, top 5 reasons for using Twitter, her follow policy and her Twitter Colophon.  (Yes .. I had to look up Colophon as well).

Colleen gives a nod to Ike' Pigott's Twitter Policy page.  Ike focuses on how he plans to show up on Twitter - his follow policy and his rule that there are no rules (or at least no etiquette).

Valeria posted this ConversationAgent thread on the idea of how Valeria participates in in social networks while articulating her generous philosophy of:

• be helpful
• be in conversation
• connect ideas and people

In that post, Valeria responds to a comment pointing out that individuals and organizations have different approaches to Social.  In that spirit, I'll start with my Social Media Participation Policy for @skipshoe.

I'm thinking that my participation policy needs to address my broad use and intent, the channels I plan to use, and topics I might cover.  This is for my audience AND for me.  If I can identify and commit to a handful of channels, then I can improve my effectiveness.

How about something like the following?

Channel:  The name of the Social Network and Media Channel

Purpose: Why are you there.   Best not to make it completely self-serving... it is a 2+ person space, afterall

Topics: What kinds of topics am I looking to cover here.

Attire:  How I plan to come to the party.  From Professional to Business Casual... to Flip-flops, towel and beer.

Attendance: How often might you expect to find me here.  No promises... just an intention

Lets give it a try.  I plan to do this for four channels: Twitter (@skipshoe), Facebook, TalkaboutTribes (this blog) and LinkedIn.   I may add in some IRL (In Real Life) Networking channels and some specific online forums later.

Channel:  TalkaboutTribes Blog (this blog)

Since this blog may have many contributors, this is only my perspective on using Talk about Tribes.  Some of my colleagues may have a completely different take.

Purpose: To share, gain feedback and co-create ideas, strategies, frameworks and other perspectives around Social Media.  I love the idea of tribes and tribe-building as a primal ground for our participation in today's social networks.   New generation tribes are emerging daily, which include the best of tribal practice, but transcend by incorporating new practices enabled by new technologies and new ways of thinking.

Topics: Ideas, strategies, frameworks and other perspectives around Social Media

Attire:  I'll be wearing my lab coat ... with a scientist's eye, I hope to dabble in anthropology, psychology, network theory, analytics and marketing

Attendance: I'll be monitoring your comments regularly (multiple times a week).  I'd love to be blogging 2-3 times a month.  At least once a month is more likely.

Channel:  LinkedIn

Purpose: To engage in conversation (sharing, listening, learning) around my profession as social media strategist, internet marketer and entrepreneurial coach.  There is a strong IRL-virtual intersection here.

Topics: At the time of this writing, I'm following threads on Social Media Metrics, Analytics and ROI.  Social Media Monitoring is a close second.  These areas of focus will follow the cycles of my own professional learning and curiosity.

Attire:  Professional attire - I'll wear a sports coat.  I hate ties.

Attendance: At least weekly.  Oh yeah, I follow my friend Ed Callahan's advice on only connect to people I've met in person.   This really helps keep my network on LinkedIn strong.  If you want to link to me and we haven't met, we can connect outside of LinkedIn (here for example) or we can meet in person (I drink a lot of coffee).

Channel:  @SkipShoe

Purpose:  Exploration, learning, sharing, joking, coordinating, water-cooler chatter.

Topics: Twitter probably best represents my work-life balance.  I'll talk about business stuff, especially sharing cool learnings about Social Media, but also Aikido, Integral Theory, parenting, my friends and the Philadelphia, Western 'burbs lifestyle

Attire:  Jeans and tee-shirt

Attendance: Erratic.  I'm trying to use Tweetdeck and Gist to hone my Twitterfeeds into streams of really useful content, which I can then share - or comment on.   But I might get busy and disappear for days on end.  I will watch for your mentions or DMs.  And if you DM me what looks like a broadcast message, I will probably unfollow you.   I sometimes cross-post business stuff with @teamandadream, my company Twitter account.

Channel:  Facebook

Purpose: Facebook can be addictive fun.  I don't take it seriously at all... but it keeps drawing me back in.

Topics: Mostly goofy stuff about things that happened in high-school (they didn't have technology back then), commentary on life... or really just commenting on others commentary on life

Attire:  70's clothing.

Attendance:  I indulge probably once or twice a week

Channel:  Meetup.  Integral Philly Meetup Coordinator.

Purpose: Individual and collective development in and through an integral context.

Topics: Our intention is to practice both form and formlessness. We hold conversations to explore and unpack challenging topics raised by members using an AQAL (Integral Theory) lens. We actively explore movement, beauty, art, silence and nature.

Attire: My Gi for Dojo practice

Attendance:  Weekly.  This is mostly an event management site, although I do hope our members start participating in dialogue.  Hmm.   Maybe I need to seed some conversations?

So that's my first cut at my personal Social Media Participation policy.  Do you have one?  If so, please share in a comment below.  Anything you would change or add to what I've included here?

Let me know!

This screencast presents Version 1.0 of the Map (current version is at 4.0). What other maps have you encountered that help you navigate and create Social Media and Internet Marketing strategies?    What important dimensions are missing from this map that you'd like to see included?