Why?

What’s not evident in their announcement is why they’ve decided to stop the Edmontonian.  Possibly their close friends know, and maybe if it’s appropriate at some point they’ll let us all in on the deal.  Regardless, it seems that Edmonton may have lost a popular blog, but not the popular bloggers – that’s the good news in all of this.

What now?

Samsonow claims “their heads are bursting with ideas and schemes,” and of that, we have no doubt.  Although we didn’t get a chance to work directly with Jeff and Sally, we respected their tireless work to bring the world interesting stories about Edmonton.  A blog is a huge amount of work and commitment, a work load they clearly embraced for two and a half years.  We respected the quality of their work and ability to make us and I suspect countless others laugh.   Are there other Edmonton focused blogs to fill the gap?  In a manner of speaking, sure, but I suspect not with the same wit for sure…

Good-luck Jeff and Sally, we at fusedlogic wish you both all the best with the next chapter…stay in touch.

Back in 2004, I was intrigued by the “blogosphere,” not a blogger myself at the time I wanted to learn more.  In 2005, I felt I had something to share via a blog, and thus, fusedlogic.blogspot.com was started.  Struggling with finding my blogging voice, and not being a natural writer, I stretched and pushed myself to get better.  Along the way I met other bloggers online, such as Hugh MacLeod, owner of the unique “gapingvoid” blog.  We’ve had exchanges in the past and he was the first to introduce me to Twitter in a manner of speaking.  That aside, Hugh is often rude and abrasive in his approach and that’s exactly how he and his audience like it.  He’s also quite ingenious in the way he’s built his business model – living on his own terms, and being true to who he is, regardless of criticism.  I find these types of stories fascinating, especially those that centre around how daily struggles of business passion turn into business success.  The blogosphere is filled with these stories…your stories have been my personal inspiration over the years to learn more, experiment more, and deploy within the social web on our behalf, and that of our clients. Your stories have formed the foundation for our stories.  We listen, learn and create our own solutions based on our interpretation and input from the outside world, in that way, I think we’re all connected.  It’s this connectedness that drives the social web in many ways, and it’s that connectedness that drives our company.  Everyday we’re striving to be better, everyday we look to perfect our sole purpose for being – social web engagement.

We stand for taking on challenges, we stand for “thinking digital first,” we stand for the best customer service we can possibly provide, we stand for exceeding expectations, we stand for high quality.  We stand for honor and fairness and respect.  We stand for educating ourselves and those around us, we stand for having a plan and for having flexibility in that plan, we stand for change.  We stand for being leaders in our own way.  We understand there’s risk in business, we stand for powering through that risk with knowledge, we stand for overcoming fear.  We stand for “fail forward fast, we stand for learning from our failures.  We stand for all night thinking on a client problem, we stand for “where there’s a will there’s a way.”  We stand for our community, we stand for giving back and for sacrifice, we stand for you and for our clients, we stand for success.

Often it’s clear that you’re not sharing your stories with us here on our blog, rather you’re simply observing us and that’s ok too.  I’d like to inspire you to share what you and your organization stand for, here, or on your blog, on Twitter, wherever it suits you.  Knowing why you do what you do, and what you stand for is important.  We’d really like to hear your story.

We do this work because it inspires us and yet we were passionate before we started.  We do this work because it’s focused in learning about people, communication, speed, collaboration and yes technology too.  We’re a part of a special and ever growing tribe.  A digital tribe, a social tribe, a business tribe, an inspirational and passionate tribe, and we love it.

Today’s organizations should realize that assigning the responsibility of social media to an intern does a few things that are not necessarily great for their brand.

1.) Puts front-line communications of the brand message in the hands of the inexperienced.  If you wouldn’t position your intern to pitch your biggest client in a lead capacity, don’t put a mass communications tool(s) in their hands either.

2.) Puts inexperienced intern in a position where they may be forced to make a critical “judgement call” decision publicly and in real-time.

In both cases, serious damage could be done to the brand “when” the situation is mishandled.  Often it’s a matter of time, not if but when.

Here’s another perspective.  Assign a value to your brand. Once you’ve estimated the financial value of your brand – $10M, $100 million dollars, measure that against how old your company is.  Then realize that it can all be negatively and dramatically impacted with an ill-advised tweet, video, blog post or photograph.

Sure many executives today are social media rookies, however, they should know what’s critical to communicate about their businesses and they have the authority that comes with their positions to back it up. In many cases the simple fact that the executive is the one communicating builds credibility, credibility that could lead to business.

Social media is not a place for interns to learn about your business via real-time interactions with your customers.

Your top line executives cannot afford to be “too busy.”  The world is a different place today for business and organizations, if your CEO, VP Marketing, VP Communications are not prepared to operate in this space to some degree and they’re not prepared to learn more about social media, your organization is at a severe disadvantage.

How would you like to wake up one morning as the CEO of a publicly traded company to find out your stock “allegedly” lost $180 million dollars in value?  The result of a song that went viral on Youtube.  You didn’t see it coming because you were “too busy.”

The above blog post link refers to the “cost of inaction,” I would offer an alternative to that – “cost of ignorance” could actually be proved in many cases.  Ignoring the implications of social media on your business model and its frontline communications or subsequently handing this important aspect of business communications to an intern is in my opinion foolish.

With the increase in aggregation solutions and cross-integration of popular channels, social media will become even easier to manage.  Effective management of social media channels comes from education and understanding how to use them first.

When was the last time the number of “impressions” your ad campaign generated also told you how many conversations about your brand were happening in real-time?

When was the last time “frequency” explained how many times a customer mentioned your brand, product or service to others and the sentiment of that comment?

When was the last time the above information actually told you “why” people were buying your stuff?  Or why they didn’t buy?

The truth is, most organizations despite the decline are still spending large dollars in the traditional advertising space and are justifying these expenditures on metrics that are estimates in many cases.  Then those same executives look at social media investments with risk in their eyes, a lack of understanding and claiming there’s no way to measure.

Top executives claim there’s no budget for social media.

What they’re really saying is “we don’t understand.”  Then they provide a media buyer with $250,000.00 or more to go fire away at the big three, print, television, radio for a 90 day campaign.  Why?  Not because it’s necessarily the right answer but because it’s what they understand and the safe move.  Now in this recovering economy there are shifts in these patterns to be sure.  Much of the traditional ad industry is feeling the effects.

Every once and a while, I come across an executive who has thought the above questions through and has realized that the ability to hold conversations, build rapport, inspire action directly on a mass scale or one on one and track all of those activities is definitely appealing. “Welcome to the social web.”

Social media metrics do exist, they’re just different.

Social media is word-of-mouth advertising ON FIRE!  You have to change how you look at measuring things.  Measuring conversations is a hands on job.  You can’t just tally up the traffic numbers and say we won.  You have to dig deeper than that and it is possible to do so.

A strong online campaign will demonstrate “engagement” levels that will include a number of things.

My definition of social media “impressions” would constitute the number of times elements of your campaign get mentioned across blogs, articles, comments, video, images, mass-media, micro-sharing platforms, social networks.  This information would also include, “sentiment and influence within micro-tribes.”

Beyond just eyes seeing the message, many other things can be identified.  Did your message move or inspire further actions or discussion publicly online?  If it did, this can almost certainly be tracked.

What was the sentiment of action taken?  Are citizens blogging about your message, brand, product or service positively or negatively?  If they explain their position and why they feel the way they do that can be identified.  Did they spoof your television ad on Youtube?  Did they create a twitter hashtag and engage others on Twitter?

The interaction and what can learned within the social dynamics identified can help your organization understand your customer and their relationships or “social networks” better.  That understanding can lead to emotional engagements, emotional engagements can lead to influence and influence leads to action.  The social web is where you need to commit your resources long-term and you need to do it, yesterday.

Where’s the value?

The value is in the human connections and relationships generated between your brand and your customer.  Those connections properly nurtured will build loyalty and loyalty means repeat business and influencing new business.  The social web is the perfect environment for this.  That’s where the value is.  This doesn’t happen overnight and it isn’t easy.  However, the ability to amplify a message is immense and shouldn’t be ignored.  The problem isn’t with the social web, the problem is with current organizational mind-sets and it’s time for a change.  If you truly understood the social web, you’d never call it a fad.

• The Social Web Isn’t Just for the Young Anymore (gigaom.com)
• Forrester: Social networking grows up (infoworld.com)

In case you missed it here’s the press release.