Junkets and other related boondoggles have a long history – probably the first one was a rich Babylonian who invited some scribes out to brunch at his hanging gardens so they’d say good things about him. And we all know about junkets for doctors and journalists and politicians, and the rules many organizations have to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. Everyone in social media is obviously watching the new FTC guidelines (I like these comments from Steve Hershberger of ComBlu), and most of us have heard stories about all the good stuff that can get sent to bloggers.

So let’s just take as a given that this kind of thing can go very wrong indeed in the wrong hands. This event was in very right hands, however. I’m somebody who often gives things to people in my job role, so I’m very interested in clear guidelines and disclosures, which will be a topic for another day.

The funny thing is that when we think of a junket, we think of a Mai Tai by the pool in Hawaii. Tech Field Day was not that kind of experience, but it was geek heaven, just the same.

Let’s turn over this introduction to organizer Stephen Foskett:

from Rod Haywood’s post: Gestalt IT Tech Field Days 2009.

Note what Stephen says – although it was sponsored by a set of vendors, this event was not controlled by the vendors. Sunshine Mugrabi helped organize the event and talks about how it rapidly came together. Attendee Rick Vanover describes the schedule and answers the vacation question:

Q: Is this industrial tourism?

A: To an extent, but it is not a vacation. Our day on Thursday started at 7:00 AM and went until 9:00 PM. Friday started at 7:30 AM and we didn’t get back from dinner until around 8:30 PM. Yes, we had fun – but we were busy giving the sponsors our full attention.

The event was a huge success for all the participants. 1,274+ tweets and dozens of well-disclaimed blog posts later, the vendors felt like they were able to communicate very intimately to a set of influencers. The attendees, all top-notch independent technologists, were stuffed full of information about new technologies, which was a plus for their jobs, and they were also able to convey what their perspectives to their readers, which was a plus for their blogs. A second Tech Field Day is now being planned.

An important part of the event was the quality of the presentations. You’ve got to bring smart technologists to talk technology with these guys. No marketing fluff, although you can talk benefits, as long as they’re real. Everybody loves a good benefit. Attendee Rich Brambley wrote about the experience in  Thoughts About Presenting to Engineers. Ed Saipetch, another attendee, also wrote The Five Rules of Tech Day Club:

The genesis of this list comes from the question I asked myself and other attendees constantly which was, “What can we do to get deeper than a standard technical presentation or trade show booth demo.” …

2. Cover the basics and then get into the weeds – We love the weeds. Some of us do anyway. It shows us you know what you’re talking about. It separates you from your competition. Tell us your strengths and weaknesses. We are more effective when we are armed with more information.

What were the success factors of this kind of event – new to our corner of the blogosphere?

• Strong commitment from the organizers of no quid pro quo. What the bloggers wrote was up to them. Even when there is a vendor as a sponsor, like HP, this has to be the case. (Disclaimer: I’m pitching this kind of event to several groups inside VMware. I think it’d be a blast.)
  
• Independent technologists who have their reputation at stake. I respect all these guys, and their reputations are based on being good communicators about their honest technical opinions.
  
• Full disclosure. Disclose, disclose. When the topic comes up again in a few months, disclose some more.
• Deep technical mind melds. The most successful vendors (the ones that generated the most love) had some of the coolest products, yes, but they also sent in top-notch technologists to have a deep dive with the visitors. This is critical; spewing marketing bs at a bunch of technologists is deadly – even if they don’t like your product, technologists like talking to other smart technologists.
  
• A grueling schedule (14 hour days on and off the bus probably qualifies) that no sane person would mistake for a vacation.
• Invite the right people: don’t aim for super-connected influencers whose greatest claim to fame is how often they get retweeted. In this kind of event, you want people with authority and respect in the communities you want to reach. Their opinion counts where it matters.
  

Obviously, we’re just catching up to the MommyBloggers here. Have you participated in an event like this? What ethical obligations do we all have going forward with these kind of events? What are other ways that we can get the opportunity to communicate deeply with people who specialize in our domains?

[Updated with more on presentation tips from Ed, and a final bullet point on inviting the right people with authority.]

I call this diagram a social media map, although I’m not sure if there’s a more standard term. This diagram attempts to put your various social media channels and platforms into a relationship with each other and with your other online properties. This particular diagram is modeled on the way our company is structured, but I’ve tried to generalize it to make it useful to anyone at a large enterprise technology company. This is Version 0.1. Your comments and feedback are welcome, and I’ll try to incorporate them into the next version.

In case it’s not clear, grey blobs are web properties. Grey circles are blogs. Blue squares are Twitter accounts. Punch-card-looking blue rectangles are Facebook pages. Arrows are links. Most components should have arrows between them, because a link goes one way or the other at some point; I’ve just shown some of the more meaningful links.

Marketing Funnel. I’ve tried to spread out the components on a continuum across the marketing funnel — characterizing activities from the earliest awareness activities on the left to the care and feeding of happy customers on the right. This is for convenience and shouldn’t be taken as restrictive or prescriptive — most social media channels are used all in all phases of the marketing funnel.

The primary web components

Corporate Website. We’re talking about resources to be consumed and talked about — social media objects, if you will. For us, these are things like new white papers, webinars, product release notes, event schedules, etc. Most of those resources reside on the corporate web site. On our product pages, we point out to relevant blogs and community forums.

Campaign Landing Pages and Microsites. We try not to blindly spam our community with links to our campaigns, but when our campaign offers are cool and of interest to a community (white papers, research reports, interactive calculators, sales promotions), we’ll link to them from appropriate blogs and Twitter accounts.

Webinars, Events. Maybe include technical white papers and other resources here as well. On our site, these are hosted in a separate application than our regular CMS; thus the circular blob.

Program Blogs. We have a number of blogs from various product and program teams on our blog site (hosted on Typepad). Most of them act more as announcement platforms than dialog platforms, but some get a good back-and-forth going, and all are useful. These often point back to resources on our site. Although blogs live under a subdomain of our main URL, conceptually and tonally they are separate from the corporate site, so I’ve depicted them floating above the main site.

Community. Our community site is large and healthy. We get a lot of questions and a lot of traffic, from Google and elsewhere. There’s a lot of troubleshooting information there, and it gets linked to quite a bit. Our community platform (Jive) hosts blogs as well, so I’ve included a few of those here. Until recently, our community site was one of the 5 key tabs on the top of our page, and it’s still has corporate trade dress and is linked to from all over the main site, so I’ve depicted it as firmly embedded in the corporate site.

Knowledge Base. Our more structured site with known issues, tips, and suggestions. KB articles are authored by us, not directly by the community. but suggestions do get incorporated regularly into the content. Recently, the KB team has begun experimenting with producing some videos.

The primary social components

Central corporate channels: blog, Twitter account, Facebook page. Designated by the dotted line circle as sort of a single entity, these main corporate channels can act as ‘the voice of the company.’ Since the blog can hold more text and multimedia assets, it can act as your main content channel, with the Twitter and Facebook platforms pointing to it. Although similar content can go up on each of these channels, we find that quite different conversations take place on each platform. These channels link to all the other social media platforms as well as the corporate web site, but I’ve omitted those arrows for clarity.

@Events. Our particular webinar/event/white paper CMS application doesn’t emit RSS.  (It’s coming.) The content doesn’t seem deep enough for its own blog, since it’s mostly listings. However, we do have a Twitter account for events. This is a human-powered account that talks about upcoming events, both online and offline. This Twitter account both serves almost as a town crier: “Starting the 9am webinar on disaster recovery http://bit.ly/abcd” as well as a way of getting butts in seats when an offline event isn’t full. We were a bit surprised that a global Twitter account can help fill up a user group in Indiana, but it seems to work.

Facebook Product Pages. We have a few Facebook Pages dedicated to various Products. Since we have a somewhat wide product portfolio, but our products are often used together, we’re still figuring out how many different Facebook pages we should have. Right now, our main criteria is audience. Since our main audience is IT professionals,  our product for consumer and enthusiasts on the Mac gets a separate page, but yet another product for the data center, no matter how awesome, probably doesn’t need a separate page.

@Blogs RSS. A Twitter feed from every blog seemed excessive. We already aggregate our blogs on a single page, so we took the RSS feed of that aggregation, ran it through Twitterfeed, and made a Twitter account. It’s clearly an automated posting, so we haven’t had any confusion that it’s a human being. By serving up blog titles to people interested in them, it gets retweeted a lot. Although I’ve recently started using an RSS reader for the first time in years, Twitter is really the place most people seem to get their news these days.

@Topics. We have one team (our Performance team) that has taken all the content from their various corporate and personal blogs, plus all the new threads from their community forum, and then fed all that RSS to a Twitter account. Then an actual human acts as host/concierge to the account. It’s a useful way of aggregating very specific topics into a single feed, and the goal is also to drive people to answer new questions when they get asked in the forum. A joint robot/person account can be confusing, however, so the person part of the equation needs to be active or people will think this account is just another RSS feed.

Support Blogs & Twitter. Our support team has a dedicated resource covering social media. They have two blogs — one dedicated blog listing new content on the KB and one human-powered blog with featuring new resources, curations of entries around particular topics, and other important announcements. They also operate two Twitter feeds, one just about new KB news (human-powered), and one as the principle customer service response point on Twitter.

@Community Blogs RSS. We also pull together a few dozen of the best blogs in our area written by customers, partners, analysts, and journalists. Again, we aggregate, take the resulting RSS feed, and push those titles into the Twittersphere. They get retweeted a lot.

The Twittersphere. These days in our area, most of the directed conversation (troubleshooting, specfic questions) takes place in our community, and most of the undirected conversation takes place on Twitter. Most of the interaction takes place among personal Twitter accounts. We have a lot of employees on Twitter, and we just assembled the ones who tweet mainly about technology and work topics in a Twitter List. This standing chat room is the best thing going on right now among this group of technology peers. A lot of news and interesting resources — from the corporate mother ship, the media, or lots of blogs — gets passed around here. Most of the influential bloggers in our space at least check in. In 2009, Twitter is the engine that moves the rest of the social media train. So mentally draw in arrows from here to everywhere else in the diagram.

So what have we learned?

The modern enterprise web and social media presence is a complicated thing. This kind of diagram starts to break it down in big chunks, but each one of those chunks has its own goals, strategy, tactics, and owners. In fact, all of the areas should be governed by an overall corporate social media strategy before getting down to “what Twitter account goes where” sorts of details. The landscape of use patterns and social media site capabilities is changing too fast without some higher-level goals.

What are we missing? Hmm… Our YouTube channels. Our Planet blog aggregation pages. Our Partner-facing social media channels. The entire community of bloggers. News and community sites from 3rd parties.  I’ll try to incorporate them in the next version.

This kind of diagram, while it incorporates some primitive notion of “links go from here to there,” really doesn’t talk about the flow of information or the canonical locations of news and resources. That’s an entirely other conversation.

Is this kind of diagram useful to you? Any additions or suggestions? What’s your social media map look like?

This whole exercise in diagram construction was inspired in part by Matt Zellmer’s post on Integrating Community into Corporate Websites. Thanks, Matt!

Jeff Jarvis isn’t shy about his take on the future of journalism and the media business. One thing I like about his view of the future is that he describes an ecosystem of new voices, new business models and new channels. That certainly seems to be where we are, although I’d bet things will settle down from the current Cambrian explosion once we figure out what works and what doesn’t. In his recent post, The future of business is in ecosystems, Jeff posts the diagram on the right that lays out a future news ecosystem. He’s writing about general news outlets, but if we translate that to the tech press, “Hyperlocal sites” translate into specialty sites covering one technical topic, like storage or networking or even virtualization. “Local networks” aggregate and draw from those sites, something like Planet V12n or Gestalt IT. Just to be complete, we can stick academics and standards bodies in the “Publicly supported journalism” slot.

Gestalt IT is one of the new species in this ecosystem. Pulled together by Stephen Foskett, Rich Brambley, and Chris Evans, Gestalt IT aggregates and publishes independent voices in the tech blogosophere. From their “About” page, What is the Gestalt:

What is the best practice for modern IT infrastructure? That can be difficult to decide, especially when the interests of vendors of hardware, software, and services are involved. IT professionals are constantly bombarded by messages and products, so it can be tough to know who to trust.

The best move is to rely on the gestalt: the sum of the best sources of independent input.

Sites like Gestalt IT are bringing to the table something that’s gone missing from the tech press – real technical voices. I was recently talking with the VP of Marketing of a tech startup, who was observing that even 10 years ago the technical trade press had extensive testing labs and smart technologists on staff. They could take hardware and software and, while not exactly replicating a real world test, at least put it through its paces and get some objective validation of vendor claims. Times have changed, and ad revenues have dropped for the tech press just as they’ve dropped for the mainstream press. Those publication labs and those technologists have been let go. There are a few labs left out there, and there are lots of journalists who understand technology. But even those writers don’t have access to lab facilities and basically need to pull together stories from press releases and a few quick phone calls with customers. They’re not printing fiction — I’ll gladly read honest evaluations from customers any day — but they’re not digging deep into the technology to tell us what hands-on testing would reveal.

Who steps into this gap? I think there will be multiple entrants, including a new generation of analysts. But one of the obvious groups that are picking up the slack are bloggers, and the emergence of aggregation/publishing platforms like GestaltIT and SiliconANGLE. There are examples in other domains, like another site I’ve been enjoying recently, Social Media Today.

At Gestalt IT, the contributors are hands on technologists – they have 11 authors so far. Each contribution links back to the originating blog. The site is really shaping up nicely as a one-stop shop for commentary on enterprise technology and best practices, and I hope that their traffic is reflecting that, both to the home site and the sites of its contributors. Of course, since everybody has a day job, questions about bias and objectivity must be asked, but they answer them in the normal way we’ve learned in the blogosphere — complete disclosure. Gestalt IT combines that with a soupçon of editorial review just to keep everybody honest.

Why did they start Gestalt IT? The technology trade publications stopped paying them. There were no longer enough ads to support paying these highly-experienced technologists enough to make it worth their while.

So what makes moving to a model like Gestalt IT worth it for these experts? The answer is about changing the game and shrinking the market – call it the Craigslist Effect. At a recent event (more on that in Part 2 about the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day), I was talking with Gestalt IT co-founder Stephen Foskett about ads and ad networks. Would Gestalt IT be interested in taking some ad dollars from VMware?

Most enterprise technology blogs have minuscule traffic compared to the big sites. That translates to ad dollars corresponding to not even beer money, but in the words of Rod Haywood, enough revenue for a cup of coffee once or twice a month. The return on investment for most tech bloggers is much more about learning, fun, and career visibility — because they’re certainly not bringing in the cash. Currently virtualization blog sponsorships are in the hundreds of dollars per month, and it takes a lot of those kind of checks each month to bring you up to a technologist salary.

Stephen told me they weren’t interested in taking sponsorships at this time. Considering how much money we were talking about, giving up ads on Gestalt IT isn’t taking food out of anybody’s mouth. The lack of ads also means (1) less work for the publisher, Stephen; (2) a cleaner, faster-loading interface for the readers; and (3) a lack of editorial interference from any sponsoring vendors. Gestalt IT is all about the indirect benefits of blogging. If you want to just focus on the money part of Gestalt IT — since eventually we all do have to put food on the table — the business opportunities and career benefits coming out of a good technical blog can be striking. The benefits of having a higher profile voice in the online media technology conversation accrues to both the individual and his or her employer. Gestalt IT is meant to be a multiplier of this kind of influence.

Gestalt IT is in many ways very similar to Craigslist, and in fact Stephan mentioned them explicitly in our conversation. Craigslist has effectively shrunk the newspaper classified market by 90%. They are often criticized — both by MBA types and by the newspapers that are losing revenue — for not charging for most services and for not even showing ads. They are crtiticized for “leaving money on the table,” for not maximizing their revenue and shareholder value.  But CEO Jim Buckmaster has been quoted as saying that “users haven’t expressed an interest [in ads].” End of discussion.

For the Gestalt IT authors, remember, the freelance technology writing market was shrinking. If the market is going to zero no matter what, acknowledge that, charge zero, and create value in a complementary market. Gestalt IT isn’t in the business of competing for a shrinking pool of online ad dollars. The authors are no longer in the business of competing for a shrinking pool of freelance writing gigs. Instead, they’re participating in the growth of this new media ecosystem, and creating more for their themselves than they would be earning coffee or beer money.

The reality, everybody realizes, is somewhat more complicated. As my colleague quipped, “A Corporate Social Media Strategy is about as useful as a Corporate PowerPoint Strategy.” Social media is both a set of tools and way of using those tools to communicate. It’s not just Yet Another Marketing Program, and it’s going to be used in different ways across the organization. My smart colleague then followed up by comparing social media to email. Everybody uses email in the way that makes sense to their job function, but we don’t have a single thing called a “Corporate Email Strategy” that applies across the company. On the other hand we do have  corporate policies in place for email usage, and we do have corporate process and rules in place if you want to do bulk email externally.

We’ve grown our social media usage gradually and in a distributed way. Our main community site has been thriving for 6 years – we’ve been executing on a community strategy the whole time, and now that community strategy includes social media tools. Over the last year or two, we’ve put down a number of chips on various social media pilots, programs, and channels. Some have worked; others not so much. This year has been a year of internal programmatic growth. Throughout the year, I’ve met with dozens of groups inside our company to talk about social media, to capture their requirements and to discuss ways they could be participating. Some of those groups had already jumped in with both feet before they called me, and some have felt that their involvement can be smaller for now. The company is doing social media already, and quite successfully.

Complicating creation of a single “Social Media Strategy” is the changing landscape — proliferation of sites and tools, changing ground rules on those sites, and the trends and changing use patterns of the people we want to talk with. You can set up all the strategy you want, but once you get past the big bullet points, the instantiation of that strategy into tactics has to take into account this changing landscape. Twitter wasn’t a factor 18 months ago, and has opened up an entirely new approach in how we interact with our community and how individual programs can participate. How we’re approaching Facebook has been rapidly changing, with changing demographics and changing functionality and ground rules. I always try to not get caught up in the newest shiny social media tools of the week, but these kind of details do matter in our policy and our execution.

We’re now in a good place to  evaluate where we are, up-level the grass roots discussion, and make sure we, as a corporation, have a shared understanding of how we are using these tools. Some of the areas of our social media policy that we are discussing:

1. Overall stance and policy. Corporate blessing that it’s OK to use social media for your program, and how to be personally involved. We have this, but isn’t uniformly known across the company.
2. Centralized corporate social media channels. How are we using our corporate channels — blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.? We’re now a big business, and we have a lot of news – are we effectively getting the word out?
3. Policy, messaging, and training. Best practices and help for individual teams and people from around the company to use social media. This is less about control and more about giving people the proper tools and training to be effective.
4. Integration with outbound & inbound marketing. We do a lot of direct email marketing, and we buy a lot of online ads. How does social media integrate with this, how do people choose to get information and offers? How does social media help to bring people back to our website?
5. Listening and respondng in public. Every part of the organization already talks to its constituents, but it’s usually in private. Now that it’s in a social sphere where everything, both good and bad, can get magnified, what tools and policies can help?

If we can successfully get some shared understanding on these points, we’ll have a nice Corporate Social Media Strategy going in to 2010. It won’t be in a box, and it won’t be one-size-fits-all, and the expression of our social media strategy will likely look different by the end of the year, but we’ll at least have some common ground about what we think we’re trying to do here in social media land.