Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

If you take the online population as a whole and break it up into segments of people who actually contribute content, it’s pretty stunning how few people drive conversations and content in social media.

90 - 99% Read-Only Participants

I’m one of the 1% of people who blog fairly regularly, and regularly add content to online conversations, whether it be on my own blog, AboutUs.org, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

1%. It holds up.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, noted the following stats in 2005:

• 50% of all Wikipedia edits are completed by 0.7% of users
• 1.8% of users have written more than 72% of all articles

Bradley Horowitz, formerly with Yahoo!, once estimated that 1% of Yahoo! users formed groups, and that about 10% of Yahoo! users interacted with content in some way.

Even in the most serious of social networks, LinkedIN, there are just a few of us who contribute content and actively utilize the built-in social network features available to all users.

Harvard Business School did a study on LinkedIN adoption, and found the following:

• 90% of LinkedIN users use LinkedIN as a “better Rolodex” or better than email
• 5% of LinkedIN users are active online networkers (mirroring results in the real world)
• 5% of LinkedIN users are actively focused on searching for people to help them solve problems - recruiters, consultants, etc. The question and answer generators are here…

So it turns out social media isn’t all that social after all. Just like in the real world, there are relatively few people actively generating and propagating conversations online. Think of the last party or real-world social gathering you attended. My bet is that there were fewer than 10% of the people doing 90% of the talking. (I’m a listener in the real world… hardly a talker at all.)

The key to businesses and organizations tapping into social media effectively, then, is this:

• Develop your 1% content contributor(s) and leverage their activities on your behalf to the hilt. They’re rare, and they might not be the types you’d suspect. (Remember me? Not a talker at parties…)

Find them in your organization by seeking people with strong opinions. People who write great emails, or already blog themselves. Do you know who these people are in your organization? If you don’t think you’ve got them inside, hire them, contract with them, give them food, props, whatever… but find and support your content contributors in their efforts.

• Engage with other 1%’ers to get the word out about your products and services. Authentic, enthusiastic and well-targeted communications are most effective here.

I’d always recommend reaching out via social networking engines first…it’s much more interesting to get a DM (direct message) on Twitter or a comment from LinkedIN or on my Facebook wall (even when delivered via email) than a traditional email.

So few of us actively participate, imagine the messages and media for which are our ears and eyes are most finely tuned…

Health 2.0 is getting closer. I got a Twitter “follow” earlier today from @natldialogue, which always piques my interest.

Post within a post: A “follow” is someone (or some organization) who decides to listen to your Tweets by following you. I’m always curious as to who’s bored enough to follow me, and checked out their Twitter page. Keep in mind, most of us immediately check that out. If you grab me in your first page of tweets, I may decide to follow back, and listen to you, too.  Which means it’s always a good idea to check your latest profile page on Twitter and see whether you’ve got a series of Tweets worth others following…

So I had a look at @natldialogue’s profile, their web site, and last 10 Tweets, and I was actually surprised and pleased with what I found! From the National Dialogue site:

“In late October, just before a critical presidential election, citizens and stakeholders around the nation will join a unique experiment in 21st century democracy. The National Academy of Public Administration, on behalf of the Federal CIO Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and the General Services Administration, will host an online national dialogue that demonstrates a fundamentally different approach to the work of government.

This national discussion will engage a diverse group of voices in tackling one of the key issues confronting the nation’s health care system: How can we use information technology to improve the way patients interact with the healthcare system, while safeguarding their right to privacy? (JLJ: emphasis mine) Participants will have an opportunity to discuss challenges, generate breakthrough ideas, and recommend principles that will be presented to the next Administration.”

Brilliant.

Open to the public, but targeted at key stakeholders (since I’ve blogged and Tweeted about “health 2.0″ I’m sure that’s how they found me), the web site is open all week (October 27-Nov. 3) for discussion. You’ve got to register to submit content, but the registration is simple.

Once you get in, there are four categories of content: Ideas, Principles, Concerns and Stories. I plan to start a discussion on consumers online search habits, pharma and FDA monitoring issues.

• Ideas submitted on many topics, “consumer-generated health information” or “transparency in health care…”
• Some submitted Principles are “definitions: privacy, confidentiality, security, etc.” and “consumer control of and protection of his/her personal health information.

I found there are already many conversations going on at the site, with advisory board members having conversations with participants. Anyone care to join me online this week, to express some opinions on Health 2.0? I’d love to see some technology sector folks chime in with me…

In my email today came an interesting bit of research: the 2008 Presidential ImagePower Survey by Landor Associates and Penn, Schoen & Berland. It describes the two presidential tickets’ brand associations, as selected by a survey of voters:

Click on the thumbnail for larger viewing,  the PDF of the results as announced by Penn, Schoen & Berland is here.

I found it interesting that the candidates complemented each other so well… and that Obama and Palin were more similar than not, in terms of brand perception, especially in being “different.” She was a Wendy’s in a sea of McDonalds, he was an iPhone in a bunch of Blackberrys.

The survey was conducted in early October, where 1002 Democrats, Republicans and Independents voted their brand associations.

I read with interest The Short List for US CTO article in yesterday’s BusinessWeek by Tom Lowry. In it, he said:

“Obama sees greater broadband penetration as an enormous economic engine, much like the railroads were a century ago,” says Andrew D. Lipman, a veteran communications lawyer in Washington. “That is why the CTO will play such a critical role in any recovery plan.”

The US ranks 15th in percentage of broadband penetration, with only 23 in 100 Americans having access to broadband services, according to a July report issued by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Linked forever in my brain with this report will be an article that appeared in today’s Wall Street Journal by Dr. Amar Gupta, the Thomas R. Brown professor of management and technology at the University of Arizona. The article, Prescription for Change, starts off:

“The health-care industry is about to undergo a global revolution driven by a force it can no longer resist: information technology.”

“…. IT security will eventually meet the expectations of the health-care industry, just as has happened in other sectors, like banking. And when it does, powerful IT networks crisscrossing the globe will change the way much of health care is delivered: Outsourcing and offshoring of medical and nonmedical services will increase, providing more efficient health care at the most cost-effective rates; systems integrations will allow more medical records to be transferred swiftly and securely; efforts to monitor the safety of medicines will gain global access to data; and professionals and patients will find authoritative and up-to-date information on every specialty online.”

Re-read that last paragraph. Outsourced health care is coming. And we can use it. Ladies and gentlemen, we (Americans) are behind the eight ball in health care, in comparison to other countries around the world.

According to the National Coalition on Health Care:

“Experts agree that our health care system is riddled with inefficiencies, excessive administrative expenses, inflated prices, poor management, and inappropriate care, waste and fraud. These problems significantly increase the cost of medical care and health insurance for employers and workers and affect the security of families.

National Health Care Spending

• In 2007, health care spending in the United States reached $2.3 trillion, and was projected to reach $3 trillion in 2011. Health care spending is projected to reach $4.2 trillion by 2016.

• Health care spending is 4.3 times the amount spent on national defense.

• In 2005, the United States spent 16 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care. It is projected that the percentage will reach 20 percent by 2016.

• Although nearly 47 million Americans are uninsured, the United States spends more on health care than other industrialized nations, and those countries provide health insurance to all their citizens.

• Health care spending accounted for 10.9 percent of the GDP in Switzerland, 10.7 percent in Germany, 9.7 percent in Canada and 9.5 percent in France, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

If we had a US CTO, who did nothing more than work on the problem of bringing broadband services to the masses while improving network security to the standards set by the health care industry, we’d boost our economy, bring the US into proper alignment with other developed countries, and provide the health care technology to support the health of our aging population much more effectively. Perhaps even from within our own borders.

Please vote on November 4.

I’ve been working with several clients recently who are just now setting up their company blogs. One of the first things we do is to create categories, also known as keywords, for their blogs, which serve two functions:

1. From a search engine marketing (SEM) perspective, categories and keywords should be phrases for which we want the blog to appear in search results.
   • Properly constructed, long tail (define) keywords can help refine a topic so much that your relevance in search results is more accurate. For example, I was searching the other day for best practices in commenting on blog posts. I typed in “commenting best-practices” and found nothing but developer information on how to properly comment code. When I changed the search to “commenting etiquette,” the results I was served were much more relevant. Defining as closely as possible how you want to be found is critical to how you write your blog. And thinking like your clients and prospects is key to creating categories and keywords that will ensure your success.
2. From a PR, or thought leadership perspective, what are the topics around which the blog will be built?
   • Every blogger and every blog should have a mission, and every post should support the mission in some way. So as you’re considering what you want to be known for in the blogosphere, think about the words you’d want your readers to know you by. In my blog, I think I’m known for discussing marketing technology - a broad category. In that category, I write about topics such as blogging, RSS, social media, collaboration tools, SEMPR - the combination of search engine marketing and PR, etc. These topics are all topics for which I’d like to be known, and (therefore) found in search.

At the same time, most of my categories are very broad, with the exception of SEMPR (on which few search, I would imagine, since I made it up).

I should practice what I preach, and refine my categories further.

For example, instead of simply using “RSS,” as a broad category, I generally write about “enterprise RSS” which is a much tighter definition, and likely to generate a more relevant result for those who are interested in how business use RSS, vs. RSS itself.

There are tools to help pick great keywords, but the very best one is sitting right between your ears and behind your eyes…

How might you refine your keywords and categories to better serve your blog, your prospects and your clients?