Wanting to reply in-fact and not heresay in my response, I linked to the TOS of one of my favorite platforms, LinkedIn (TOS link), and singled out the first paragraph to draw attention to how they dealt with the issue.

“License and warranty for your submissions to LinkedIn. You own the information you provide LinkedIn under this Agreement, and may request its deletion at any time, unless you have shared information or content with others and they have not deleted it, or it was copied or stored by other users. Additionally, you grant LinkedIn a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and royalty-free right to us to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, process, analyze, use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, any information you provide, directly or indirectly to LinkedIn, including, but not limited to, any user-generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques or data to the services, you submit to LinkedIn, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties.”

When we next spoke, they recited the part that begins with ‘Additionally, you grant…‘ and pointed out that this was precisely the language that gave their friend, and now them, reason to question whether or not participation in an online social network is something a business or business person should do!  Here was the damning evidence that showed that they would take whatever your said in the network and use it to their own benefit, never having to share any of it with you!

I agreed that this kind of a license to use, re-use and otherwise manage the content we all post online was egregious - but needed.  The biggest reason is because we live in such a litigious society and that if we did not give this permission, it would open up the platform provider to a whole universe of claims that content had been mismanaged once turned over to the social platform in question.  If it were me as the social platform owner, I would also demand a similar right to the content – but only because the member wanted me to facilitate the exchange between they and their followers, friends or constituents – not because I really cared what they posted or how potentially lucrative the idea might be.

The reason why I think we’ve been driven to give over this much ownership of our content  is laid out in three parts; 1) why a social platform needs to gain unrestricted access to the content posted, 2) the brand promise and how it impacts participant behavior and finally, 3) member expectations of confidentiality and privacy.

All Access Required

1) Unrestricted access to the content you’ve posted is required, primarily because without it, YOUR presence would not function. You share posts, messages and various content with your friends, but the delivery of that content is left to the platform provider.  The platform will deliver the message for you, but they have no mechanism or interest in monitoring the content once posted for proper use – your friend might actually reuse the content in a manner you did not intend (BTW, you should expect it) and it is this unanticipated usage that sets the stage for the terms of the license.  If the platform provider did not gain access to the unrestricted license for your posts, it would not be long before a member claimed that the social network  published content they did not own or that they permitted it to be published against the wishes of the member.  At almost a billion members for Facebook and 110M members for LinkedIn, how possibly could they be expected to manage your preferences for your content on their platform.

All rubbish of course, but we live in a litigious society where you can pretty much count on the 5 ANY’s of a Lawsuit – ANY one can sue you at ANY time, for ANY reason, ANY where for ANY amount.  By you granting unrestricted access to the owners of the platform, you essentially inure them from any liability for the potentially damaging actions of your network.  There are other permissions and fair-use doctrine that also apply, but by securing this license from the content creator (you) they can provide you a good quality experience on their service for a fair price – I think free is a pretty fair price.

Brand Promise of Confidentiality

2) We as consumers of the services provided by the platform have come to expect a certain level of privacy in our postings, but not necessarily because the platform owes it to us, but because we have come to expect it over the years. For example, I see the LinkedIn brand promise as that they will manage the platform functionality in such a way they will not intentionally damage my persona by their actions.

Since they launched the platform in 2003, we’ve come to expect a certain behavior from their brand and so far, they’ve delivered pretty well.  If they had opted to use member content in some way other than what members had intended, the social media ecosphere would be filled with messages from offended users – there has not been any such transgression that I recall however.  This becomes then the brands promise to handle your content reliably. So long as that brand promise is maintained, the social network of humans, supported by the platform, functions.

First Rule of Fight Club… Don’t talk about Fight Club…

3) There is an expectation of privacy and confidentiality within the network, but that is ONLY manageable by the member. The best way to maintain privacy around you, your company and your ideas is that trade secrets and intellectual property should NEVER be disclosed in any online forum that has the potential for unrestricted public access. This is where knowing what NOT to publish to the web comes into play. The only way to keep a secret is to not share it at all to anyone.

LinkedIn and similar publicly accessible online platforms are not the place to post a secret or your IP.  If you send a private message using the platform it will not be disclosed without a court order, but that’s not the issue being considered – it’s the ownership and control of the message posted in a public forum, which as the TOS specify, you grant an unrestricted license for – both to the platform and your personal network.

The short answer for my friend then is to not create posts around trade secrets or intellectual property online at any time for any reason – it is a secret after all.

CMOs and marketers will want to look at these types of actions and apps on Facebook, and determine which of them are precursors to buying behavior. They’ll want to make sure that the organization is able to leverage consumer intent, which is another fast growing area.

Sentiment, Tone & Intent

When we began writing ‘ROI of Social Media’ in 2009, we spoke with Radian6 and Alterian, then leaders in the social monitoring space, and learned that detecting sentiment and tone were admittedly hard to do. Fast forward to today and talk of ‘intent engines’ that can provide automation that will look at a stream, assess the conversations and then present the most relevant ones for human assessment and intervention.

What’s also coming out of some of the latest work is an understanding that intent can be segmented into specific applications – some easier to develop than others. Intent analysis in a setting of support and service delivery is one thing, intent in consumer purchase behavior is quite another.

Intent Engines applied

The activity is migrating to one of two camps – intent for support / service and intent in sales / marketing. The Intent Engine in Service and Support provides a management tool that a manager can use to understand how the line team is doing and what commitments are being made. From that perspective, the data can be managed to provide insight on what needs the customer or client is expressing, what commitments are being made and how well follow-up is being executed. These systems will work in real time and provide relevant content quickly, holding only stats for reporting over time. The technology is coming (or is here) that will make this task pretty straight forward – I’ve seen it work and I think that service and support organizations that use the web will find the technology very useful.

Intent Engine for Marketing and Sales is a still ahead of us – maybe this year, but more likely in the next few years. The requirement in this application is to handle a broader data stream from multiple platforms and to provide a more persistent data store for the data being assessed. Multiple data streams because consumers are using multiple platforms to express their intent with textual, image and video content and persistent because in order to uncover the KPIs and expressions that lead to a revenue relationship occur over time. In order to understand the data and behavior, we need to be able to connect one comment with another during the consumers purchasing process, which may take only a few minutes in lower value goods to many months for higher value, hard goods in a B2B scenario.

From low hanging fruit to hard work

If tone and sentiment for marketing was hard, intent is going to be hugely hard. Early on we can expect the use of the Facebook verbs as an early indicator. I predict we’ll see dozens of Intent Engine providers racing to support Facebook verbs, but that’s the low-hanging fruit for an Intent Engine – the real challenge will come in the work to provide a deeper level of analysis that considers time, actions and the object of that action. Initially we’ll see broad term Intent Engines that cover non-specific jargon and popular colloquialisms. These early engines will give way to niche engines that cater to industries that have the capital to support them – energy, financial and CPG/FMCG will be likely early adopters.

Intent Engines then are coming and service and support organizations will find that the technology will greatly simplify their world and help manage commitments and resources. I’m very excited about what the sales and marketing engines will look like – that’s where the gold is I think. Once we can identify consumers on a path to purchase by their social presence, marketing organizations will the find funding that can be shown to impact the top and bottom line.

In the last post, the aspects that create complexity in social marketing were presented and in this post we look at how to evaluate them.

Aside from the mis-steps in content itself (witness the faux pas of many major brands, ranging from JetBlue, Wal-Mart and GMC and countless smaller organizations) there is, to me, an obvious challenge in identifying the layers of complexity. This post will explore the complexity relating to organizational readiness and how to understand what you’re up against before you even begin.

In most engagements, I look first at a snapshot of the existing social presence and what social media sites are a part of the marketing toolkit (Facebook, Twitter, a blog, LinkedIn, etc.) As part of the snapshot, I also look at how they are used. I look at among other things, how recent posts have been made, the frequency of posts and whether or not there is any engagement with the audience. What has become apparent for me is the apparent complexity of the implementation is overlooked and many times, the presence is ineffective. If we examine the factors around staffing, # of geographic locations involved, management or compliance approval levels and the type of content being managed, we can readily understand why many implementations fail.

What I’ve also seen is smaller organizations with limited resources tending to focus on text-based social platforms and publishing primarily textual content, even though other content has been shown to be much more compelling to the audience. As the organization gets larger and matures, the content types expand to include pictures, images, and social-quality video.

Larger organizations do these and add more content with higher production values – commercial-quality videos and professional, AP-style writing. As a social marketing initiative rolls out, the number of social media properties the organization is involved with will expand too; a B2C organization might start on Facebook with a basic business page, but soon they will be wanting to make sure pictures that contribute to the marketing message are posted and publicized, videos are developed and posted and, if the efforts are successful, they’ll add more people to the social media functions and increase the level of production values. If an organization has a footprint that has them in multiple geographies, several of those locations may find they want to develop a localized online presence, they’ll look to be involved in posting content promoting their local operation to local prospects and customers.

This increasing complexity can be mapped and provide an understanding of what’s actually needed in terms of management structure, workflow, scheduling needs, and multiple author management. To aid in the assessment, we developed the Content Complexity model.

The Content Complexity model is a construct that graphically represents the inherent complexity of the social content management model they begin with. Within the construct, a business can place a marker in the quadrant that best represents their efforts in utilizing social marketing.

Here are a few examples we’ll use to demonstrate the Complexity Model –

• Company 1 – a small to medium business in a single city with a single author, but multiple departments having a stake in the online presence. Platforms include sites that handle text, image / pictures, podcasts and video.
• Company 2 – a foodservice brand with a single author in a headquarters location and multiple regional locations. Departmental approval is required for posted content that includes text, images / pictures and video.
• Company 3 – an international CPG/FMCG brand with multiple authors, multiple locations around the world, multiple platforms and several layers of approval required for content.

As this model is utilized the permutations will be many, but we can use these examples, positioning each on the construct in a position that represents their basic complexity and then, later place these same companies on a Complexity Master to understand how complex their models really are.

To map a given organization on the model, begin with placing related aspects together on the lesser grids. One grid with each axis representing # of geographic locations by # of authors and again, on a second grid, the # of media types by # of compliance inspection levels involved. Each quadrant is labeled with a letter, ‘A’ in the upper right, ‘D’ in the lower left. The lower left (quadrant ‘D’) represents fewer participants and as we move to the right and up along the axis, ending at quadrant ‘A’ representing more participants.

The placement on the lesser grids gives us an easy to understand representation of the simpler aspects of authors / geography and media types / compliance. Using these placements and simple averaging, the markers can now assume placement of a truer representation of the overarching complexity ahead for the enterprise. Placement on the Complexity Master panel represents a merger of the location of the respective markers on the lesser panels in the construct. Now we have a clear representation of the underlying and inherent complexity, as well as the likely investment required, for each of the organizations.

Why go through this exercise? The understanding gained in this exercise is one that gives an organization a comprehension of the challenges ahead and how best to approach and budget for the task. Armed with that understanding, areas of investment can be projected out into the future and budgets better prepared.

For example, Company 3 should expect to make continuous investment in their staff, training, tools and content management infrastructure. Not simple to begin with because of their size, but because of the complexity of their operation – several people, several locations, several departments and many platforms for content development and delivery – they also need to not under-spend or understaff the operation. Companies 1 and 2 however have few authors, multiple departments (more than one), and several media types (textual, video and audio). In these operations, workflow management becomes the important function, permitting management to exercise more control over the published work of the authors. For Company 2, the organization may also need to project their social presence into a geographically dispersed team, adding complexity for sure, but also adding additional layers into compliance.

Inability to recognize these complexities puts strain on the organization. Staff is mis-managed, content arrives late and social engagement is stifled – to the detriment of the brand. The social marketing model will, conceptually at least, places authority for interaction and content close to the edge of the organization, perhaps much closer than many manager feel comfortable with because the corporate paradigm demands control over the process, the message and increasingly, the medium.

The emerging social paradigm suggests that brand definition is achieved in conjunction with the consumer itself. In dozens of conversations with marketers, I am still taken by the number that take the phrase ‘social media’ more as ‘media’, as in yet another channel in which to broadcast a brand message, versus ‘social’, which suggests an opportunity to connect with and engage the consumer audience. The failure to adopt the social in social media marketing is the hallmark of many failed initiatives and the repeated failure of marketers in making the distinction will be the single most difficult gate for the next generation of marketers to navigate.

After having looked for a year, I had hoped to find more content management solutions by now that are even beginning to handle this level of complexity but I have not. In the next post however, I’ll start looking at the existing tools and technology out there, beginning with the low or no cost options and then moving up the ladder to more function, more robust and more expensive alternatives.

[The slides are also posted on SlideShare here.]

What is happening as social marketing takes hold in the enterprise, is that the need for content expands, often at an exponential rate. What the industry is experiencing is that content development is, or will become a focus of the marketing organization and more resources will be deployed to help create and manage it all. The complexities that arise from a developing and managing content for a national or global social presence can be daunting, but if forewarned is forearmed, being able to predict how the complexities are going to impact the initiative, you get a much higher potential for success.

The demand for content development is pushing up budgets and headcount because it is a process to do the research or source inspiration, draft a post, record a video or a podcast, polish it up a bit and then post it on YouTube, Google+, Twitter, Facebook, or wherever. After posting the content, there is a huge selection of tools and technology out there for letting the world know about the post, albeit many require nothing more than permitting one application to notify the other and send over a few bytes. Shifting from one tool to another and then yet another is not necessarily intuitive, but it is manageable for a single person doing social marketing for a single or limited number of brands.

The issues arise when you take on more people and then have to develop a team to handle the job of content creation, posting and notification. CoTweet / Exact Target, HootSuite, TweetDeck and several other posting management systems are taking the initiative to support a team effort, but they are still a few steps short of what is needed. Once a decision is made to increase the volume of content it opens up some challenges in the areas of finding and managing authors, geography, compliance, and media types.

Authors - Think copywriters and editors here. Obviously more people creating content helps with the content demanded by the audience. The content produced might be any one of a number of types though and each author however will have differing skills, a different way of talking about a particular topic and require different tools. This aspect of diversity in the author pool should be embraced.

Geography - When you add multiple locations, as a regional, national or global brand will, the demand for content expands yet again. While ‘www.’ stands for ‘World Wide Web’, much of what we’re seeing as effective social marketing is geographically relevant, mobile content. A local franchisee or partner may want their own voice in social and this voice will have an impact for the brand. Assuming the brand decides to support content from those locals, the need to manage the content so it represents the brand, as well as the local entity adds a layer of complexity.

Compliance - Compliance is relevant regardless whether it is for governmental regulation or branding. If content needs to be reviewed for compliance or adherence to company standards before they are posted, it represents another layer in the complexity model and a delay in providing real-time engagement – a response to a blog post or a tweet 2 days later is as good as not replying at all. Compliance monitoring is becoming a 7×24 task along with marketing.

Media Types - Many of the Social Media Marketing Systems handle one type of content – textual. Social engagement uses much more than just words however. Other types of rich-media content need to fit into the model as well. Video, pictures, images / graphics, audio, and textual content all need to fall under this matrix and need to be managed to fulfill the demand for original and relevant content.

The popular systems in the industry do one thing or another, but nothing supports a broader involvement of the organization in the social marketing model and considers marketing objectives in the process – yet. Additionally, the measurement or metrics many provide are decent early stage KPIs, but most cannot show how the online marketing is meaningfully connected to revenue.

A big part of why I’m writing this though is I am looking for still better social content management system solutions and I want to hear about what you’ve come across. The next post will show how to correlate the complexities and examine some of the solutions.

Leave comments below or email me at Steven@SocialMktConvo.com.

The task becomes even more complex when you have to tailor the digital communication to a local context that complements the image and message for a global brand.

But how? Listening, understanding and then engaging in a local context – the basics of any online and digital strategy.

Listening - Establish your tools and technology to monitor and engage in support of your strategic objectives. Different size companies will have different needs of course, but without a listening infrastructure in place first, engagement with any aspect of the target market will be based on incomplete data.

Understanding - This is where the local guys can start to make a difference and can get involved. Once you can hear what’s being said, who is saying it, whom they are talking to, what is being discussed and where they are having the discussion, you can then decide how best to engage.

Global companies need to consider the local aspects and context of their response and no one can provide a better sense of the local market better than a local agency.

A local agency can help in some very specific ways -

• Determining the volume of conversation in country or region
• Assisting in the assessment of sentiment with localized language and colloquialisms
• Researching Influencers & preferred tactics for development

With this knowledge in hand, a company can determine whether an individual or aggregated response is warranted.

Engaging in local context - Look at the similarities with other countries and regions. This can provide a foundation on popular topics, common sentiment, the technology infrastructure available. Videos are awesome in locations that have the bandwidth needed, but in other locations a picture uploaded from a feature phone camera is much more popular. Which do you want? Doing the work without a local presence, even by proxy, is daunting and can lead to embarrassment and damage to the brand image.

How best to handle a demand for a global digital communications is to make sure global companies get local – use a local team to listen and gather data on local discussions, fold that information into a regional or national program and then connect them all together for a sustainable global message.

[Image Credit: Svilen Milev via SXC, http://efffective.com]

I intend to host StevenGroves.com at Blogger and take a more personal angle to the content there.  I love to cook and I love social so why not live into that outlet and do some foodie blogging.  I also like a like a good lifehack as well as he next guy and I’ve had to engineer or build a few things I’m kinda proud of so that’s what we’ll likely see at my personal blog.

Here at Social Marketing Conversations, I want to get back to posting more about the things that drive my my passions and interests in business and specifically the social marketing strategies, tools and technologies that are available – I love this stuff.  I’m very excited about what kind of site this can be and I want it to be an extension of my other conversations going on in other online communities and can write more about my thinking on the questions I want to discuss – basically I want to write a good deal more on a wider variety of subjects.

Thanks again and thank you in advance for your patience during this update.  Here’s to an awesome and productive 2012!

Socially Yours,
Steven Groves

The image shimmers out of focus and disappears – an image of your accountant materializes and tells you that you’re a business burning through a million a month and when you get visitor to your site, there is nothing more than a form to fill-out for a call back.  The phone number on the ‘Contact Us’ page leads to a ‘Dell Hell’ kind of experience and no human being can be reached from outside.   Zombies?  Yeah – they get through, but only because they’re brain-eating, persistent monsters randomly pushing buttons on their Zombie-phones.

The final chapter in this scary tale is that you have no idea whether that $1.12 pay per click campaign has driven ANY traffic to cover your costs or whether the visitor has even been to your site before.  Scary huh?

It’s a horror story being repeated a million times in a million companies all around the world.  In spite of all the automated counters, data collectors and postings in the social web, businesses leap to use the technology that has been promised to get hundreds of customers to walk through your door.   Most businesses have no idea how or if the investments in marketing you’re made are panning out.

The hero in this horror story is that it’s not an unsolvable equation and making better decisions about where and when to invest is possible – more so than has ever been possible.

How to Escape the Nightmare

Start with the small things – listen first… listen like the mummy is somewhere around you – quietly and intently.  Find out where your customers are congregating like a crowd of brain-eating zombies.

Next, understand what your audience is saying and what they’re talking about.  Knowing that Dr. Jeckle is also Mr. Hyde will help you craft and time the message so that Mr. Hyde is prompted to connect with your Facebook page, leaving Dr. Jeckle out of the community of followers and friends.

Now reach out to connect. The tentacles of human-hunting aliens should have nothing on you.  Once you know what’s being said , who is saying it and to whom they are saying it means that you can regularly and easily participate in the discussions going on and not been seen or treated as the Monster from the Black Lagoon.

Now take a step back every time you post new content and see if you’ve put out what speaks meaningfully to your audience.  Include a call to action, a link and most of all, make sure you’re participation is relevant to the audience.  For the hard cost that goes into an installation of Google Analytics, you can see the correlation between postings and visits.  If you have a product that can be purchased online, even by using a Gift card or eGift card, you can then start tracking how visitors arrived at you site, where they came from and what they did after they left your site.

Is this all you need to do? Maybe… but I’d bet that this implementation would only be the start of the journey to improving the payoff of your online and social marketing investment.

Beginning with these steps will help keep you off the Elm Street of marketing when Freddy is prowling for a new victim.  As you participate in the discussions and communities relevant to you your product and company you’ll uncover what content drives participation and engagement – the first step in stopping what doesn’t work and what does.  Following these simple steps will keep next year’s Halloween Haunters away from the doorstep, out of the cellar and vanquished from the creaky attic.

Brands are not yet settled into G+, but it’s reported that Google is looking for the optimum combination of brands and consumers so that it’s a more natural extension of how consumers want to connect to brands. My hope is that it is not yet another iteration of the interruption driven model that has predominated marketing for decades, but I got to wondering what would it look like if G+ actually addressed the paradigm and sought to try something better, what would a brand interaction in G+ look like? Here’s my take on what it might be like.

For brands to connect with consumers on G+, (when they can) the consumer will have to opt-in to the brand and include them into a Circle that they see regularly. I think we’ll see a permutation of the Google AdWords product that is smarter. Keywords will be scanned and the connection between the conversation and the offer will take on a better meaning. I think that brands will be able to better identify the real influencers in respective markets IF (and this is a big if) the brand can be given access to the social graph / Circle stats of the consumer. How will they get access? Consumers will grant it – usually in exchange for something of value. What kind of value? Some people will trade access to their social graph for a cup of coffee at , others will require a bit more consideration.

Accelerators to adoption will include connections between products like +Personal.com, which I really like, but do not yet understand how they’re going to be relevant if I cannot connect my permissions and profile to the social networks I’m using – profile fatigue is starting to set in with consumers and we, as an industry, have to find a solutions.  OpenID, Google profiles and Facebook Connect are just placeholders for now and the real power in this space I think has yet to emerge.

What to do for now is to develop a presence in the social space in a way that is both genuine and in a way that recognizes that your persona can vary relative to the audience you wish to address without being disingenuous.   Learning this, knowing it and being able to act on it for a brand though will be a challenge – too many of them are wrapped up in an old-school mindsets that places monthly and quarterly.

Working at the intersection of ROI, marketing and social media in particular has been a topic that has drawn my interest since the early development of social media as a connecting consumer technology.

As social media came onto the scene, a debate cropped up that social media was a ‘tool of the people’ and that to propose its use as a business tactic was heretical.  We still see vestiges of that debate now and then, but by and large, we do not see much of it I think because the flood of early practitioners has subsided and the bar for entry as a social marketer has been raised past the point that creating a Facebook page and opening a Twitter account suddenly launched a new consultancy.  The discussions by marketers has risen to a point that business people recognize that marketing has an ROI that can be associated with it and that social media marketing can have a VERY high ROI indeed.

Social marketing ROI is not a dark, foreboding concept that only technocrats understand, at it’s base is the correlation of information from multiple points that helps us all understand how a marketing strategy that includes tweets or Facebook posts can impact revenues and costs.  The red-herring discussions of the ‘ROI of your phone’ or a ‘return-on-influence’, or ‘return-on-engagement’ are getting more and more hollow by the day.  I think it’s because we’re recognizing that these metrics are made up and promoted by evil minions of misdirection who may not know how to speak otherwise.

Truly savvy marketers are realizing that the only ‘I’ that matters in ROI is ‘Investment’ and that if marketing is going to get increased funding for their efforts, the rest of the organization (particularly those that manage budgets) speaks in business terms like these – so marketers are learning the particulars of ROI or facing the prospect of being replaced by someone who can talk the talk of the executive suite.

Just how much longer do we need to allow these minions of demonic misdirection to suck the life out of marketing initiatives and render them useless to management? *sigh* obviously longer than we should, but in order to get the conversation back on solid ground, I know we need to start with committing to a broader conversation about 1) where your customers are congregating and 2) then asking how best to reach them, always 3) seeking the genuine ROI along the way.  Either that or 4) drive a wooden stake thought their evil little hearts.

Steven Groves is co-author of “ROI of Social Media: How to improve the return on your social marketing investment” and your host at www.ROIofSocialmedia.com

I was not sure if his question was for a survey, if he was looking for engagement or if it was a professional question he is trying to answer for CoursePark,  but his question made me think for a moment to a blog post series from July 2009 on ‘The Trinity of Social Media” that suggested the trinity should be a blog, a micro-blog and a social network.  I have thought of the post often and continue to wonder if the trinity might need an update eventually.  The 2011 edition of the Trinity I think does warrant a refresh and this will be the first in the series.

Let’s put the construct of the Trinity in context here for a moment; we’re talking about a business presence, not personal and we’re talking about spanning two of the relevant media networks; Owned & Operated (O&O) media and Earned media, which relies heavily on social media.  There is no distinction at this level of a B2B company presence or a B2C.

What’s changed for 2011 and beyond?

The objective has not changed – we want to drive traffic to the O&O site or network of sites.  Eyeballs on pages, not revenue at this point, but traffic – which is a proxy for awareness of our product, service or brand.   What has changed is the social technology and the features and capabilities of the various platforms.

Do any of the changes warrant a change in the model?

Yes – in one particular area: the social network component.  When the original Trinity model was introduced, Facebook Groups were supported and Business Pages were not yet introduced.  Are there be other changes?  Yes – but not in the tool selection I do not think.  The fundamentals are holding and IMHO the foundational tools and technology for an effective social presence are still a blog, micro-blog and social network.  The tactics we deploy however are different today than they were in 2009 and as we cover the new state of the Trinity, we’ll discuss the changes.

Audience Participation Notice

I’ll write the articles, but I’d like to include your comments.  Whose comments – you, the person reading this right now.  If I could reach through the screen and point at you I would.  Comment below on what you think the changes might be for you or send me an email with whatever your thoughts are.