A nice little piece about Phase I of the Yamaha social media strategy in in today’s edition of the Media in Canada website…

I’m preparing for the Social Media 2007 Conference in Chicago next week, which I am both chairing and speaking at, so here are a couple of interesting articles about business adoption of social media I’d like to share with you – analysis will follow next week.

This report from Lewis PR takes a global look at corporate blogging and has some interesting conclusions:

Less than 5% of companies worldwide have a corporate blog

On individual business objectives (i.e. increasing morale or networking – no word on marketing or increasing sales) blogs score worse than traditional methods on a value-cost basis (which actually makes me wonder what people are spending on these other items – blogs are relatively inexpensive)

Lewis surveyed 300 companies in 10 different countries, and because they found such low rates of adoption, shelved plans for larger-scale research. The document also outlines their four-step approach to determining whether you should set up a corporate blog and includes a number of confusing charts and wheels.

CEO blogging is also very much on the minds of the Internet this week, with this great and insightful article from Wired (hat tip to James Koole) and news that Jonathan Schwartz thinks all CEOs should be blogging within five years. But I have a question? What if they’re boring and/or can’t write? What would be the purpose of blogging then? If he means that all CEOs will be using blogging platforms as part of their SEC disclosure requirements that would probably be a lot more accurate/realistic.

At least, I suppose that’s how Queen Elizabeth II might describe it, and here’s what her MySpace page might look like if she knew what the Internet was. I especially like how she appears to be unable to stop quoting the words to “God Save the Queen” in her “interests” section.

Amazingly, Liz only has about 1500 friends at the moment. Is this a sign that MySpace has truly jumped the shark?

Welcome to the sixth edition of Social Media Today, the official podcast of the Social Media Collective. In this episode (among other things) we learn more about “social application” mashup platform Teqlo with Rob Boothby, Senior Director, Solutions Marketing for the California-based startup.

Do subscribe to our feed – we’ll be interviewing a new member of the Social Media Collective each week, the podcast is published fresh every Wednesday. You can even leave us audio comments right here using the handy tool below.

Click to listen:

Show Notes:
Rod is one of those rare and lucky birds who got his job because of his blog, we talk about how Teqlo found him and all about how the platform works. Rob talks about how he got into social media, and how his interest lies primarily in big, enterprise-class deployments of blogs and wikis, about the adoption curve for such programs and how big companies suck at sharing information inside. We also chat about RSS within the enterprise, Euan Semple’s metaphor for creating an environment in which social media platforms can and will be adopted, the idea of turning fear about negative feedback into a force for positive change, and Rod’s memorable high school summer working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Bradford, Ontario.

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I read this story over the weekend on Tim O’Reilly’s blog, and this New York Times article sums it up well. According to VC Jeremy Liew, the traffic required to get a content site earning $50 million a year in ad revenue is impossibly high – around 200 milllion pageviews a month minimum for a highly targetted site and up to 4 billion a month for a general interest site. And let’s face it, could there be one thing, or genre or topic that 6,666,666 million people a day could reliably be interested in checking out?

But – if you and three of your friends would like to make a decent living, or you have visions of setting up a nicely narrowcasted blog network a la B5 media, that’s another matter. Making a nice living with low overhead is possible with the ad revenue from small, highly targetted sites, something that O’Reilly called a “lifestyle business”; in other words, you’ll never make a fortune, but you also won’t have to work for The Man, and can wear your pajamas all day.

Is it, or isn’t it? Has social networking “jumped the shark”? According to this article, the first sign that the apocalypse is upon us is the fact that the Girl Scout cookies have their own MySpace page (who knew that they were female and 90 years old??).

The question is whether the introduction of commercial messages to places like MySpace and Facebook is turning users off and “ruining” the platform. Full disclosure: we’ve done a couple of social media marketing projects that have involved MySpace pages (and will be doing more in the near future).

It may therefore not surprise you to learn that I don’t think over-commercialization is an issue, but I hope you’ll agree with my simple reasoning: if it is boring, they will not come. If you make a commercial page, and it does not have interesting content, and no one goes there and no one links to it (I am presuming you’re not spamming people with friend requests), it will wither and die silently, taking all your marketing dollars with it. How could such a non-event ruin a social networking site?

This is part of the beauty of social media – that users can pick and choose the messages they wish to ingest. It’s the democratization of advertising, if you will – if your communication sucks (as much of it does, so you’d better shape up), it will not win the attention election.

Well, sort of. The Guardian is is reporting that Reuters will be starting

“…a version of MySpace for the financial services community,” said Reuters executive Tom Glocer. “It won’t have the latest hot videos and the ‘why I am into Metallica and the Arctic Monkeys’ blogs. Instead we are going to give our financial services users the ability to post their research or if they are traders, their trading models.”

I wonder if Reuters has heard of Ning?

Welcome to the fifth edition of Social Media Today, the official podcast of the Social Media Collective. In this episode, we go global in an interview with Luis Suarez, Knowledge Management expert and consultant for IBM Global Business Services, based in Spain.

Click to listen:

Do subscribe to our feed – we’ll be interviewing a new member of the Social Media Collective each week, the podcast is published fresh every Wednesday. You can even leave us audio comments right here using the handy tool below.

Show Notes:
Luis is incredibly enthusiastic about social media (or “social computing” as the Europeans seem to like to call it). We talk about his three blogs (Elsua.net, The Knowledge Management Blog and his internal one at IBM), how he loves the fact that the Collective feed allows him to keep up with all his favourite bloggers in one place, how blogging helped him break his email addiction, his work at IBM helping companies build collaborative communities, how Knowledge Management has changed, the notion of the enterprise-wide “Knowledge Jam”, IBM’s perspective on and history in Second Life, social media vs. social computing, and empirical proof that all Spaniards hate celery.

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We’re in the throes of the move into our new space (so nice – you really must drop by if you’re in the neighbourhood) and I’ve also been asked to guest blog on the MaRS Blog (“MaRS is a convergence innovation centre dedicated to accelerating the commercialization of new ideas and new technologies by fostering interactions of capital, science and business”) , pop on over and have a read.