I have decided to change the nature of my blogging activities.  I was hoping that Internet Quotient would allow me to express considered opinions on the state of digital strategy.  Day-to-day work demands, family and my desire to change how I use the medium, I have launched a Tumblr site.  Please visit me there, and watch for intermittent posts here.

My new blog is “BurkBurk – In a Box Now.”

There is a line in the Passover Seder in which a reader states of matzoh, the unleavend bread, “Lo, the is the bread of affliction.” When I was a young child, I read this aloud one year as, “Lo, this is the bread of affection.” [ed. note: always tell the truth when blogging, no matter how embarrassing] As my thoughts turn to Spring, I am thinking about affliction and affection as they relate to, yes, Social Media. And, let me throw in one more word: Effection.

The beginning of the Internet (it was capitalized in those days!) for commercial use was an era of affliction. Some readers may scoff at this, but I started a pioneering web development shop in 1995, and we used to laugh that our secret tag line was “This stuff works.” eCommerce, online banking, even internet service itself was spotty, and we began to develop a binary relationship with computers. It was either “Wow, this is so cool!” or “Dammit. What the…?”

Beginning around 1998, we started an era of effection. Things started to work, DSL was all the rage, and you could actually get information relevant to your personal and profesional life. My colleague, Steve Nelson, came up with the concept of the life “keychain.” Just as you had a key to your home, your car, your place of work, so could you come up with bookmarks representing those keys. The websites worked and you could effect transactions that increased your productivity.

Today, it’s become a bit of slide into affection. I wish I were talking about puppies, rainbows and warm rainy days, but I’m not. It’s a culture of rants. Listen, I’m among them–my wife’s Gateway FX6000 computer died (motherboard died) just over a month out of warranty, or 13 months after purchase. I am disappointed and angry about this (I think a computer should have a life of 3-5 years, period); and sadly, Gateway’s solution was to charge me $199 to ship my machine out for a couple of weeks, diagnose the problem, and tell me how much to fix it. Interestingly, I made the 5 minute drive to BestBuy and visited the GeekSquad. They identified the problem for me for free. Free as in speech. Boo Gateway. Hooray GeekSqaud. And, kudos to BestBuy, which offered me 15% of the value for new peripherals.

This is a roundabout way of arriving at why I am reading fewer and fewer blogs, more and more tweets (and following their links), and selectively following people by using ManageTwitter. The way I see it there are a few types of users out there, regardless of their social media platform.

1. The sloppy ones. These people don’t consider that different venues have different audiences. They post FourSquare updates to Facebook. I don’t know about you, but I like Facebook for maintaining personal relationships. If you are at your office or a conference, Facebook isn’t the place to post this.
2. The binary bipolars. These are the 40% on either side of the political equation supporting Olberman or Murdoch with blinders on.
3. The watercoolers. These people just seem to have “tempest in a teapot” conversations with each other, using Twitter mentions over and over as they chat in front of everyone. If this were a performance art piece about how people relate to each other, I’d be fine with it. But that isn’t often the case; it’s just self-promotion.
4. The oppressed ones. The government and large corporations are out to get these folks. They point out that CSRs say the darndest things, and that somehow, the CEO has taken each utterance to heart and is moving the corporation based on these things–especially as it reflects on them personally. I don’t need to say much more.
5. The contributors. Yes, I’m a TEDster, but I relish the idea of “ideas worth spreading.” If I tweet about TED, please take me seriously. If I tweet, period, please know that I’m not sending you to a “9 Best Social Media Ideas Ever” list.
6. The opportunists. These people heard it first and start spreading rumors and innuendos very quickly. Forget about fact-checking and integrity. BTW, this is not a comment on Arrington’s wonderful rants on PR people and embargoes. Embargoes have to go. But Arrington himself has demonstrated considerable skill at researching and conducting important investigative journalism.
7. The would-be journalists. This is someone who is thoughtful, checks facts, calls out those who perpetuate rumors, and provides important self-policing in the free speech gallery of the internet.  They hate paywalls, but love craft.
8. The participant. This is the group that is making “social business” grow up. They report in real time about real things that are happening on the ground. They participate in crowdsourcing and commenting programs with constructive comments. They share important things. I love these people the best, as they empower the best of government, medecine, everthing else 2.0.

So, while I love affection, I am against confusing affection with affectation. If you think your tweet is going to change the world, think again. But, if you think the body of your participation in social media will make a difference to people, businesses and culture, welcome to the Internet Quotient.

So, let me close with questions for anyone willing to comment.

1. Do you have another story about Gateway computers, positive or negative?
2. Do you trust bloggers–that is, do you think they check their facts?
3. Who do you love?

Corporate marketers seem to forget their mythology on a regular basis, and it is in these moments that they find themselves in social media hell. Consider the situation emerging about The North Face suing a small parody site called The South Butt.

You think I’m kidding, right? No, here’s a link to the legal papers. The teenager who started the site, which is damned funny, is named James Winkelmann. In response to the suit, his lawyer said, “Little Jimmy doesn’t have enough money in his left pocket to pay for a six-pack of Coca-Cola much less” the demands by The North Face’s “silk-stocking law firms,” he said.

Call me crazy, but wasn’t this the same story that has thrown the record industry into a tailspin? Imagine the boardroom scene at the RIAA as peer-to-peer sharing was just beginning. “I’ve got it! Let’s sue our customers!” Since then, some studies have shown that they would have sold more music had they allowed peer-to-peer sharing to blossom. But, one of the more effective arguments made in this case was when David Boies talked to Wired: “You’ve gone from taking on Microsoft to taking on the RIAA. Which do you see as the more evil empire? Microsoft certainly has created more value. Microsoft built monopoly power, but it did so by creating and developing. There isn’t any product innovation in having multiple companies get together and decide jointly what they’re going to do. The monopoly power of the RIAA comes purely from collusion.”

What it all ignores is the myths on which our belief systems are based. If you’re Goliath, the meme spreads because you’ve attacked little David. This story isn’t about social media at all; it’s about common sense in communications and behavior. The problem is that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Instead of trying to figure out what their customers wanted, these companies have decided that they know, that they are omnipotent. The real problem, as we all now know, is that social media is a fabulous amplification system for wrong-headed thinking.

I’m off to The South Butt now!

Purveyors of social media expertise to large corporations are cynics using the worst of human nature to sell snake oil. But, like everything, there’s something to be learned from it.

If you’ve been anywhere near me for the last few days, I’ve stopped you to talk about the recent Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) experiment involving Twitter and balloons. If you want to read or listen, which I recommend, you can find the recording and transcript on npr.org.

The background is that there was a $40,000 prize for finding eight red weather balloons distributed around the country. This nationwide competition took just nine hours. Find eight needles in the haystack in nine hours!

What We Learned

It’s still all about incentive—but also about values, style, and how far you are willing to go.

• Team and purpose incentive: The top 10 teams all used social media to mobilize massive numbers of people across the country. One team mobilized one thousand people in one hour.
• Financial incentive: The winning team from MIT used a combination of a payment scheme that rewarded you not only for finding a balloon but also for recruiting other people who might find balloons.
• Emotional incentive: The winning team also had promised to give money to charity.
• Incentive of winning a zero-sum game: There is balance in all things, and some of the front-running teams (and evidently, the competition was won by less than 10 minutes) mobilized big social communities and explicitly tasked them with spreading misinformation to the competition to buy time.

I have a list that sits above my desk detailing the seven human motivations that marketers manipulate for financial gain. I use it as a reminder to consider my own values regularly. They are:

• Flattery
• Fear
• Greed
• Anger
• Guilt
• Exclusivity
• Salvation

All of these are alive and in use in social media, because social media require short, consumable memes. In this time of rapid change and too few true thoughtful strategists, I’m sad to say that purveyors of social media consulting are using exclusivity and fear far too much. This is a pox on our industry.

The world of television and online news is going to get some of the ol’ newspaper restructuring medicine soon. A couple of days ago, I watched the live feed of the Space Shuttle Atlantis blasting off. Besides learning that it takes the shuttle only eight-and-a-half minutes to get into orbit (zero to four-thousand miles per hour in eight-and-a-half minutes!), I realized that I was watching on LiveStream. I didn’t watch any of the concert on YouTube a week or so ago, but there again, you had many people watching live from the web.

We are already applying this technology for clients, and when we find a visionary client who will couple this with social media channels, it will really explode. Our first case study was arranging for a live stream of an event announcing agreements and arrangements with people in several countries around the world. We invited interested journalists to attend the event live from the comfort of their computer. Dozens of journalists attended, and the audience lasted throughout the hour-and-half-long event.

Here are just two implications to consider:

• How will this development affect what gets covered and when? As we’ve seen, power to the people results in big changes, overnight sensations and user-generated content that may or may not be favorable to a brand. I predict that live recordings will follow this trend.
• What impact will this have on television news as video broadcasting is pried away from executives and put in the hands of the group on the ground? I predict that this will have a pretty polarizing effect on content, since, well, who cares what the advertisers think.

If you’re thinking that I’m clueless because webcams have been around forever, you’re right. I mean, let’s watch a fish tank for a while. The point now is that high-definition live streaming is simple, inexpensive, and useful. The official NASA announcer during the launch said, “Space shuttle Atlantis is headed straight onto Highway 129 and into orbit.” Of course, he was referring to the mission name, STS-129. This official digital evolution geek is announcing that live streams are on the freeway of love in a pink Cadillac.

The problem with all us digital people these days is ignorance of the scientific method.

Here’s a great blog post on the ROI of social media that is generating a lot of currency these days. I take heart in the following points about the fears that keep managers from updating the way they approach measurement based on how social media is changing the way companies connect with customers:

1. Afraid metrics will reveal the program isn’t working.

• If it’s not working, why keep doing it?

2. Afraid of what you will hear.

• If you’re deaf to the conversation, only your enemies will hear it.

3. Afraid I won’t be able to justify my program/existence.

• It’s not about justifying; it’s about improving.

4. Afraid I’ll be fired for not showing the right numbers.

• You should be fired for not showing any.

Right on! Metrics are for learning, not for lying. We are in the nascent stages of something that has huge numbers attached to it but no standardization for measurement. What do we do in this situation? What we have always done: define a metric of success and measure to it. If you fail (and, by the way, who hasn’t?), you owe yourself and your client some learning. If you succeed, just consider it a control effort for the next time so you can try to beat it.

This reminds me of the college students and first-time job seekers whose uncle or brother was a client and to whom I was asked to speak about their future. Many of them say, “I’m going to take some time and try to figure out what I want to do.” My advice is that this is a terrible idea. Try something, learn what you like and don’t like about it, and adjust accordingly. After all, nothing’s cast in stone.

Let me recommend an article in The Wall Street Journal, A Hint of Hype, A Taste of Illusion. The subhead says it all: “They pour, sip and, with passion and snobbery, glorify or doom wines. But studies say the wine-rating system is badly flawed. How the experts fare against a coin toss.” It discussed how even the best “flavor-trained” professionals have been scientifically shown to be remarkably inconsistent. A 1996 study proved that humans can reliably identify only three to four components in a mixture, but wine ratings have descriptions such as this one with eight: “Dusty, chalky scents followed by mint, plum, tobacco, and leather. Tasty cherry with smoky oak accents.”

The title of this post is attributed to Julia Child, and I think it has a lesson for the digital world today. In the absence of standard measurements, define a metric, aim for it, and learn from the experience. The landscape right now is full of people saying things like, “You don’t own your brand, your customers do.” Admit it, you’ve read that at least 47 times. Nice platitude, but what does this have to do with anything?

At the other end of the spectrum, there are some really smart people working on this problem. You owe it to yourself to check on Don Bartholmew’s blog to see what measurement really should be. (Disclosure: Don works with me at Fleishman-Hillard.)

I’m in the middle until Don takes over the world. If you want a great glass of wine, develop your guide to wine attributes and get to greater awareness about what you want and like. If you want great results from digital media campaigns, let the business results drive the ranking system.

Cigar, anyone?

Social business will be much slower in adoption than anyone imagines. Here’s why.

The headline of this post comes from an article published yesterday by The Wall Street Journal about an business technique that, despite being a “no-brainer innovation,” was slowly adopted by very brainy people. The use of checklists in hospitals results in an astonishing 66% decrease in infections from certain procedures. The creator of the checklists, Dr. Peter Pronovost, said that the checklists’ efficacy was proven but that culture was getting in the way of adoption. Nurses can’t appear to be second-guessing doctors, who get furious if they do. His solution: showing nurses and doctors how their hierarchical culture could cause harm to patients.

If you read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, I hope you recall the section about airline safety being correlated to the culture of the crew. Plane crews with an egalitarian streak are much safer than those with an unquestioning acceptance of authority where the co-pilot can’t challenge the pilot. How to speak directly and challenge without retribution are now standard training for airline officers. Oh, and by the way, pilots and cockpit staff go through elaborate checklists that require that another person repeat the item for surety.

What I’m talking about has been a theme of my career. I evangelize emerging technology for financial gain on behalf of corporations. I was an early player in commercial use of the web and see so clearly the possibilities that social media embody. But, really, I’ve spent a career trying to change culture, because what I propose is risky.

Talk among digerati about how you “have to” do social media, and how “x replaces y” ignores people and their foibles. Bran Ferren, a former Disney imagineer, gave one of the more memorable talks at TED years ago. He said something to the effect of, “Creative people, go hug a businessperson; businesspeople, go hug a creative.”

Burk’s Five Rules for Digital Marketing Adoption

1. Wait for your marshmallow. A famous experiment at Stanford in the 1960s gave four-year-olds one marshmallow and told them they could have another but only if they waited 20 minutes without eating the marshmallow in hand. They tracked the children through adolescence and demonstrated that the ones who had the ability to practice deferred gratification were better adjusted and more successful in school. The moral of the story for executives is, do a pilot first, digest the results, and then jump in.
2. Establish the measurement of success up front. Don’t use numbers such as site metrics after you create your site to justify your strategy. Do a test and measurement brief before you start to keep the statistics from lying. If you need a CHECKLIST for this brief, please contact me.
3. Embrace change in your heart. Make sure you’re not just doing something like social media on a superficial level. If you think having a Facebook fan page and a Twitter feed is social media, think again. Successful social media adoption comes from using the concept and platforms to change the way you do business, not the way you do marketing.
4. Don’t underestimate fear of disintermediation. Many valid innovations have been undermined by the fact that people are covetous of their jobs. However, if you can develop effective guidelines and policies, and overcommunicate why your effort will make the company and its employees more money, the smart people will try very hard to change.
5. Change requires partnership. A previous post of mine warns executives not to become “Lost Boys” by ignoring generation-skipping technologies. If you have children, have you discovered that they know technology better than you do, and that they find technology very compelling and a given. Gone are the days when my father told me he needed to reach a client in Addis Ababa and was told by an operator, “I’m sorry, sir. All lines to Addis Ababa are currently in use.” Executives, hug a savvy and creative geek. Geeks, hug an executive.

Individuals are the ones who bought millions of copies of Who Moved My Cheese? Move the cheese, but do so with cultural sensitivity.

Are we supposed to be authentic and transparent in social media or not? Based on the latest fuss, the answer is not. But that’s dead wrong.

Meghan McCain, a single, 24-year-old woman, took a picture of herself on a quiet Saturday night, reading Andy Warhol’s biography. I don’t know about you, but when I was 24 and I was home on a Saturday night, I became keenly aware that I wasn’t in a relationship. So, she posts a somewhat prurient picture of herself, and she ends up being called a “slut.” She was just being authentic and transparent, folks.

Ultimately, she ended up having to issue an apology: “McCainBlogette: I do want to apologize to anyone that was offended by my twitpic, I have clearly made a huge mistake and am sorry 2 those that are offended.”

In a related post, I read Robert Holland’s piece about whether or not CEOs should employ ghost twitterers. He says that using the PR firm to ghost twitter is downright unethical. Why? He says that “social media are different from traditional media. The biggest difference is that social media are about personal interaction.”

There have been multiple stories of celebrities deleting their Twitter accounts. Why? Well, there’s a music video from Miley Cyrus about it with 4.4 million views on YouTube in which she says, “I want my private life private. I’m living for me.”

This one’s an easy post for me. Social media are personal. That’s why authenticity and transparency can’t cut two ways. Or, to quote my colleague, Joshua-Michéle Ross, “Social tools follow social rules.” If you talk about work all the time, you’re boring. If you talk about your whereabouts constantly, you’re boring. If you talk to the same people over and over, you’re in a clique. But, if you talk about all the things you find interesting, you’ll be interesting!

I come back to a familiar refrain: before you start engaging in Twitter and other social media tactics, your company should have a strategy about what it’s trying to accomplish, how it can leverage social media for all the right reasons, and then start training your employees on what is and what is not appropriate for your workplace. If you think the PR firm can just do things for you in your name, social media justice will be meted out in a harsh way — and then you can hire the PR firm to do crisis communications.

Twitter is an overused, overhyped marketing tool, and I’m mad as hell about it.

Here’s the tweet that brought me to this epiphany:

RT @anamariecox: RT @kennethmoor: It is now my dream to Tweet “No money for bar…” and have Tweeters offering to buy. No one actually HAS

In annals of irony, however, if you go to a BlogHer conference, you’ll get so much CPG stuff that it will cover a king-sized mattress (thanks to @jessicaknows for that image).

Anyone starting to see the light here? There’s this perceived newfangled channel out there for the delivery of information called Twitter. So, everyone needs to use it for “marketing,” which, first mistake, usually gets associated with awareness. If you tweet at 2 a.m. about hair removal, anyone tracking a decent number of followers won’t see it. If they do, they are so jaded, that they’ll think, “Oh, so-and-so is getting paid or free samples and coupons to hype new lemon-scented hair remover!” This is what, in the business, is called a “social media campaign.” Sadly, I hear the following all the time: “We decided to pitch a social media campaign for the client, so we did a Facebook fan page and a Twitter feed.” This is across industries as diverse as CPG and B2B technology.

Hey, you say, you’re the guy who says PR firms own the future of digital. Well, I think it’s true. And that’s why I’m writing this — because marketing is about creating interest AND spurring action. Toss the “predisposed to buy” research. Show me the money, man!

Please remember the tweet above. That person wants to tweet about being at a bar and having no money — and being disappointed about no one buying him or her a drink. Marketers, enter the Trough of Disillusionment.

I didn’t make that phrase up. It’s from a Gartner article summarizing the hype cycle. Here are the five phases of the cycle:

1. Technology Trigger
2. Peak of Inflated Expectations <= Editor’s note: YOU ARE HERE!
3. Trough of Disillusionment
4. Slope of Enlightenment
5. Plateau of Productivity

Twitter’s at the trough. And I don’t mean by entertaining billion-dollar valuations. I mean the trough of disillusionment where the hype nosedives and people realize that having a few hundred followers (and I don’t have that many) on Twitter doesn’t make you all-powerful. Or, corporations realize that 700 fans on Facebook won’t even buy you a drink. If you pay Gartner, you can see a visualization of how steeply the curve goes down.

Sadly, based on my reading, it’s companies like Edelman Public Relations who are taking them there. Edelman has this training program, according to Sam Whitmore that gets you to the middle level of social media competency in 2.5 hours. This reminds me of a woman I once met who became a Reiki Master by taking a one-day class.

How do you avoid that trough and get to the “slope of enlightenment?” Well, read my previous post about how you need competent guides. Then, be sure you do the following.

1. Hire a Social Media (or Better, Social Business) Strategist

Twitter is just a tactic! Social media means much more than microblogging, and on the corporate scale, social tools used within a strategic framework can make, well, corporate money.

2. Don’t Use the C Word

The C word is “Campaign”). Social media isn’t a campaign, it “is ongoing and self-perpetuating.”

3. Ban Seven Dirty Words

Read my colleague Matt Dickman’s post “Want Better Digital Strategy? Ban Seven Dirty Words.” Those words are:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• YouTube
• MySpace
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Ning

4. Act Like a Millennial

It’s okay to act like a millennial, because you don’t have to be one to understand these new media. Here’s a useful post about this aimed at millennials, but it’s true for everyone. I just love the opening quote:

In times of change, learners will inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

— Eric Hoffer, American social writer and philosopher, 1902-1983

5. Learn from Seth the Blogger Guy

Seth the Blogger Guy was hired by AT&T to make a video, which was placed in the social sphere, to address head-on concerns of technophiles about the company’s wireless network problems. A perfect strategy using multiple social outlets. People were in a rage when “Seth the Blogger Guy” turned out to be an employee of Fleishman-Hillard. The vitriol knob was turned to 11 for a short time, but testing in the aftermath showed that most people appreciated the straight talk. It seems to me this is the first sign that Twitter is small and that integrated strategies are big. It also demonstrates some of the concern of early adopters that their community actually be addressed and not used.

6. Join My New Crusade

My crusade is to stop Twitter from entering the annals of Yogi Berra sayings. It’s heading to the trough because, like the White House dinner he attended, “It was hard to have a conversation with anyone; there were so many people talking.”

I’m off to tweet that I’d like some really juicy digital business projects and see whether anyone calls.

Today’s large-company executives are going to learn a harsh lesson all over again. And they will, like generations before them, waste the lessons of history and become Lost Boys.

Let me refresh your memory of J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan. The Lost Boys are those who were misplaced by their nannies, and, having gone unclaimed for seven days, were transported to Neverland to live with Peter Pan, the eternal child. There is a generation of senior executives all over the world I characterize as “Lost Boys” (Editor’s note: In Peter Pan, there are no “lost girls” because girls are too clever to be lost.) They lack understanding of social media, and unless they come to trust someone who is “switched on,” they leave a very difficult task to the next executive.

They run companies that are willing to settle for three percent growth rather than invest in disruptive technologies that comprise “emerging growth companies.” Many examples of this are cited by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen in his classic book The Innovator’s Dilemma. One example he cites is fixed-line telephony vs. cellular phones. In particular, many executives have yet to comprehend the concept of social business.

While I have been pushing this for a while, today’s post acknowledges that an awakening happened today thanks to an interesting blog post by David Armano (@armano) and a daring leap in a company web site by The Dachis Group. They are taking social business to a new level on their own site. It’s a great experiment, and I’ll message them privately about emphasizing transparency over utility. I take issue with the fact that they actually try to make the point of transparency of logging in real time who they are e-mailing but do less to illustrate the value of social media culture and thinking than they should.

What this teaches is that if you don’t integrate social media into your corporate culture and encourage experimentation and use, the next generation of executives will have the awful task of undoing what you’ve done. There are so many applications for social media platforms that I won’t list them here. Instead, I’ll refer you to a post by Michael Kahn, “A Dozen Applications for Social Media.”

In 1995, I had this vision of a digital future for marketers and got rebuffed by the last generation of Lost Boys. Their attitude was, “We have Yellow Pages advertising, so why would we need a web site?” Fourteen years later, their attitude seems to be, “We can’t let go of control.” I’m a realist, and I understand that no major corporation is going to change overnight. But every major corporation now pays painstaking attention to its web site. They have brought development inside their organizations.

So, what’s next? This is a classic adoption puzzle. If you’re a senior executive, then read some blogs, search for references to your company on Twitter, and invite your PR firm to give you an executive briefing about social media. Then, authorize an experiment. Pick someone from two generations behind you, and let them recommend some ideas to you. You can even have them select from any of the dozen applications in Kahn’s post.

When you get your executive briefing, don’t let anyone tell you that they can do it for you. Yes, there are pure-play social media shops, but they haven’t demonstrated any ability to really understand how to bridge old and new at a pace other than, well, breakneck. Social media is not marketing is not digital integration. Twitter and Facebook are not the universe of social media. And there are differences between platforms and applications. The best thing any firm with social media expertise can offer you is:

1. training
2. strategy
3. guidance

If your organization is not evolving into a social business, then you will become a Lost Boy, destined to live as an eternal child and missing out on the education of a lifetime, care of the people who give you money or make you money.