Some savvy entrepreneurs at ESPN were ahead of the curve in recognizing the different fundamentals of Socialnomics. Their success was the result of innovation and necessity. Fantasy Football's popularity has grown rapidly since its beginnings in the 1980's. As a result, in 2008, ESPN started to dedicate more of its television programming to discuss pertinent events related to Fantasy Football; but this increased coverage still wasn't enough. Fantasy Football experts Matthew Berry and Nate Ravitz knew that the public hungered for more and approached the ABC/ESPN brass. Their plea for more Fantasy Football airtime proved successful.

Although they were not granted airtime or support, they were given the green light to produce their own podcast, Fantasy Football Today, which quickly became one of the top-20 most downloaded podcasts within the Apple iTunes store. This was a great achievement, but they were still moonlighting and hadn't produced any revenue that would spark ESPN's attention for more support. This is when they embarked on two very innovative facets and, whether knowingly or not, they were engaging in Socialnomic activity. These two facets were actually making the sponsors part of the show's content and also allowing listeners to help produce some of the content as well.

As a result of their rapid ascent in the iTunes download rankings, Fantasy Football Today drew the attention of some savvy, big-time marketers. Their first sponsor included the feature film Eagle Eye. This movie featured Shia LaBeouf and was produced by Steven Spielberg. Aside from covering the latest in Fantasy Football, Berry and Ravitz often touch on pop culture, including commenting on the popular 1990s' television show Beverly Hills 90210 as well as the New 90210.

The podcast varies in length from 15 to 30 minutes depending on how much news they have to cover. The varying lengths of the podcasts are an important item to note and a reflection of how our world is changing. Radio and television broadcasts historically attempt to fill an allotted slot of time. That isn't the case with podcasts. If a podcast only has 16 minutes of newsworthy items to cover, then why waste the commentators' and viewers' time trying to fill the slot with subpar content?

The fact that Fantasy Football Today was able to secure a sponsor for the podcast wasn't innovative—this was inevitable once they began to attract a vast audience of listeners. We have seen this type of sponsorship in various podcasts. Another good example is the technology podcast, CNET's Buzz Out Loud (BOL). Recognized as one of the most popular podcasts in 2008^[100] covering Internet and Technology news, it too plays up the fact that its segments are of "indeterminate length." Its popularity is well deserved because the information is delivered in a concise, but humorous fashion and all angles are covered.

Although BOL was successful in securing big-name sponsors including Best Buy, they originally adopted an old paradigm format when it came to their advertising model. They played a commercial in the beginning, middle, and end of the podcast. Just like in the television world, it was not integrated but rather interruptive; this is disruptive to the listening audience. Worse, for seven months straight, Best Buy played the same exact commercial! Please keep in mind that the podcast listening audience is not made up of casual listeners. People don't simply flip through channels and land on something of interest. This podcast is downloaded daily, so many of their loyal listeners are the same from podcast to podcast.

What a wasted opportunity for Best Buy! They could have taken advantage of the glowing personalities of the hosts (at the time Molly Wood, Tom Merritt, and Jason Howell) and adjusted the messaging daily by having the hosts read or incorporate the messaging into the show as they saw appropriate. Instead, Best Buy took its terrestrial radio spot and plopped it right in the middle of the show. However, the good news is that CNET was able to learn from this and in 2010 started taking advantage of the colorful personalities and insights of Wood, Merritt, Needleman, and Howell. Hence, these guys were able to seamlessly work the sponsors in as part of the show, often with tongue-in-cheek references about how the products are used. This helps showcase something else: "the talent" of these shows getting actively involved with every facet of the production of the show, which ultimately makes it better for the listening audience and sponsors.

In fact, the hosts made so much fun of one sponsor's voice over sounding like a mafia hit man that the company made all new spots making the entire spot sound like a scene out of The Godfather. This makes advertising fun, and this is a far cry from playing the same commercial for 7 months straight.

Let's stay on that thought for a moment and review what ESPN did with their sponsor, Eagle Eye. As we mentioned, getting a sponsor for the podcast wasn't innovative; rather, it was the way in which they seamlessly incorporated the advertisements into the show, often in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. Host Matthew Berry was single at the time, and the running joke was that he couldn't get a date.

Occasionally, Berry would even chide himself about his want for female attention. Around the release date of the Eagle Eye movie, Berry kept with this shtick and dropped comments like "even if this movie is terrible, you should go see it to pay homage to Michelle Monaghan's hotness." A comment like that would often lead into a few other comments about what movies she was in and so on. This was all done without disrupting the flow of the football-themed show. Often, these tangents by Berry were about various female celebrities' attractiveness quotient—which wasn't a stretch because the listening audience is 90 percent beer-swilling males. The hosts would even give candid feedback and comments after watching the movie and discussing what they liked and didn't like about the film.

The sponsor, the producers of Eagle Eye, were also engaging in some basic principles of Socialnomics by allowing the hosts to say what they thought about the movie even if it included negative phrases like "even if this movie is terrible." This was a very smart move by the advertisers. By pointing out flaws, people will give more credence when you point out your strengths. If you try to present yourself or your company as always being perfect, then the listening audience will suspect what you have to say isn't completely true. In fact Bazaarvoice, a leading provider of ratings systems, has studies showing that if a website has two similar products side by side the consumer is more likely to purchase the product with a 4.5-star rating than the product with a 5-star rating. This doesn't make intuitive sense; so the consumers were questioned about their decision. The responses were similar in the sense that they thought the product with the 4.5-star rating was more credible. They also liked the fact that they were able to see what other people didn't like about it and discovered the complaints weren't important or relevant to them. A 5-star rating didn't seem credible to them, because they felt no product can be perfect.

Southwest Airlines realizes they are better off stating: "We only give you peanuts so that our fares cost peanuts." Rather than trying to claim that they have great food and great low airfares.

Certainly a movie is a simple product to incorporate into a show without it being too intrusive. However, the Fantasy Football podcast followed up the movie trailer success with an even greater success—their subsequent sponsor, Charles Schwab. It's difficult to find anything invigorating to say about a financial company, especially during the 2008 financial meltdown, but this podcast was able to deliver the Charles Schwab message brilliantly. The whipping boy on the show was the producer, aptly nicknamed "Pod Vader" (a takeoff on Darth Vader), who was constantly hazed by the hosts for killing the show by virtue of his incompetence. In one of the early podcasts, while they played a robotic-sounding device that answered yes or no questions, they dubbed the robotic voice "Chuck" because the advertising slogan at the time for Charles Schwab was "Talk to Chuck." They even had a running joke that Pod Vader was Chuck and that Chuck was Pod Vader.

A typical show during this time went something like this:

This was brilliant and far different from a traditional 30-second radio advertisement because the sponsor and Fantasy Football Today realized their format (daily podcast) differs from regular radio advertising—they weren't going to make the same mistake that Best Buy did by running the same spot for seven months straight to the same audience. Instead, creatively incorporating Charles Schwab placement became an integral part of the show without it being intrusive; in fact, you could argue that it enhanced the show by adding a witty element to it. In this case, through creative thinking, the advertiser's involvement actually added content rather than interruption. While we point out a mistake made by Best Buy, they quickly learned from their mistake and enabled by a CMO with a strong love of social media, have pioneered some great social media programs (e.g., Best Buy Blue Shirt employees empowered to answer customer needs on Twitter).

Consumers today, in particular Millennials and Generation Zers, don't want advertisers to shout; they'd rather have conversations and steady ongoing relationships with companies. The callers and e-mailers on the Fantasy Football Today show were having fun with the sponsorships by writing them into the show and referencing the sponsors in their e-mails. For example: "I have my Eagle Eye on the Packers game this week" and "Chuck may know finances, but he was wrong about running back Dominic Rhodes—that chump didn't score a touchdown this week so I am going to Chuck him off my fantasy football team this week."

The most Socialnomic piece of all in regards to this Fantasy Football Today podcast example is that the advertising wasn't wrapped around the content, but rather was an integral part of it. This is important because when items are passed virally between individuals using social media tools, if the advertisements are on the front or back end of the valuable content or they are banners or display advertisements that float on the periphery of the content, they are too easily stripped or removed when the content is passed from one person to the next. For example, in a company-sponsored video on YouTube, where banners are to the left and right of the video, when the video is shared among a social network—since the ads aren't in the video itself—only the video will be passed on. The advertising placement will be eliminated from the string, and the potential viral activity will be lost.

In Chapter 3, we discussed a Diet Coke and Mentos example, in which you can see that the Diet Coke items and product placement are the actual content itself. It's important to note the dramatic shift that is being propelled by social media. The world around us is shifting from a model where marketers historically have supported content to a world in which marketers and companies need to create their own content or seamlessly integrate with existing content. Ironically, this harkens back to the advent of television, when sponsors helped produce the content; soap operas are aptly named because soap powder companies used to write shows around the use of their products.

In the Fantasy Football Today podcast, it would be painfully difficult to try to find every iteration or mention of "Charles Schwab" or "Chuck" because it is actually part of the show—it's not nearly as simple as removing an advertisement that was placed at the front, middle, and end of a broadcast. The second major Socialnomic piece that the football podcasts at ESPN employed was leveraging the audience base to assist with content. As mentioned, these podcasts needed to be produced inexpensively. They weren't getting large financial backing from corporate headquarters; rather, it was "sink or swim."

One segment during the week was to report on the various teams across the league. If they had employed the principles of the past, they would have started by using and leveraging existing field reporters (e.g., Sal Paolantonio, Adam Shefter, and John Clayton) who would be sent to the various cities and team camps to learn and report back on the particular happenings of those teams. In this scenario, the shows' producers would receive high-level reporting from experts on a few teams during the week. This is an outrageously expensive model because it includes incurring costs for flights, hotels, and transportation, per diem, as well as paying top talent with celebrity-esque salaries easily in the six-figure range. These are costs that the Fantasy Football Today podcast could not afford to sustain. As a result, the producers of these podcasts decided to travel down a different path that has resulted in a brilliant revolution in news reporting. Because of its success, we are seeing a shift toward this type of news reporting today.

The producers had people write the show requesting to be the "Super Fan" for their particular team. Many companies attempt to get this level of engagement by giving away a costly contest prize for people who submit their photos with a product, create a video, or write an essay about why they deserve to be a contest winner.

This historically popular giveaway or sweepstakes approach can have the opposite effect on people submitting entries because it devalues what you are attempting to do and a typical response from a potential contestant may be "oh this company needs to bribe us to submit something and since that prize is of no value to me, I will not submit anything for it."

ESPN decided to engage in a different practice rather than employ a typical sweepstakes model. ESPN didn't give anything away, and they had hundreds of applications from fans expressing heartfelt reasons and arguments about why they should be the Super Fan of their particular NFL team. Keep in mind that if these applicants were selected as a Super Fan, then their responsibilities would include weekly check-ins reporting the current status of their particular team—they would need to know everything about them. Rather than a sweepstakes prize, the winners would actually be put to work!

This is a monumental step toward leveraging the audience base. ESPN's loyal podcast listeners were begging to do free work! This is analogous to when Tom Sawyer was painting the fence white and made it appear so appealing to those around him that they were hoodwinked into begging Tom to have a chance to paint the fence. Tom Sawyer knew that if his approach was "ah come on, if you help me paint this, there is a chance I will buy you some red licorice," it wouldn't be nearly as effective as giving the illusion that painting the fence was fun.

In this ESPN instance, the audience has become Jane the Blogger (Chapter 1). These are people who have a pressing desire to be heard. They are people who want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. They are also fanatical about their teams, and their teams say something about who they are (similar to brands). A fan of the San Francisco 49ers is more "wine and cheese with a flair for the dramatic" whereas a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers is more "meat & potatoes, Jerome Bettis, and no nonsense."

ESPN leveraged its worldwide platform to ensure that these Super Fans didn't make competing platforms at the local level. It is a proactive way to look at the old saying, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." They reversed this old axiom with an approach of "join 'em before they beat you." Every person today is a competitive media outlet.

During the Super Fan selection process, they even allowed for the audience to help determine the criteria for selection. If your suggestion was taken, then you were automatically named a Super Fan. One of the winning suggestions was that each applicant should have to donate a minimum of $25 to the Jimmy V Foundation for the Fight Against Cancer. So, as part of the application process, submitters were showing receipts to prove that they had in fact donated at least $25.

They picked the best and brightest of the bunch to be the delegated Super Fan for each team. There was a San Diego Chargers Super Fan, Detroit Lions Super Fan (bless their heart), and so on. Whether ESPN knew it or not, they were practicing Socialnomics and utilizing a brilliant strategy that can be summarized by the following:

Point 7 isn't a new construct, but it is very powerful with social media. Local newspapers have used this principle for years. The content of the local newspaper story wasn't half as important as ensuring that it was as crammed with local names—the closer it was to a yellow pages listing, the better. This is a testament to Dale Carnegie's statement that everyone's favorite word in the English language is his or her own name. ESPN realized, just like Dale Carnegie, that if they took on 32 new helpers, those 32 new helpers would be excited to spread the word to their respective social graphs.

While ESPN gets an A, they don't get an A+. One thing they will learn in time is that it's difficult for a host like Berry to perform double duty in the Socialnomic age. At the time of this writing, Berry was doing both Fantasy Baseball and Fantasy Football podcasts. Since the respective seasons have crossover, it is virtually impossible for him to be as knowledgeable as the users demand for either baseball or football. Some of these fantasy fans are fanatics of just one sport. If you can't convey to listeners that you are more expert than them, then they will tune out or may even decide that they could do a better podcast! In our new niche world, Berry should focus on just one sport, because his audience and future competition will.

Another good example of a company effectively using the Tom Sawyer Approach is CNN (iStory and Twitter). CNN anchor Rick Sanchez was an early adopter of harnessing the power of the social graph. Recognizing the huge potential of microblogging, Sanchez became an avid user of Twitter early on. Twitter's main function allows users, in 140 characters or less, to update people who are following them about what they are doing by using various interfaces (Twitter website, TweetDeck, Hootsuite, Twitter modules for iGoogle, Facebook, Yahoo!, etc.). Usage ranges from business, "Great article on Southwestern Airlines earnings release can be found here www.abc.com" to the inane, "Just had my fifth Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Venti!"

Obviously, some of Sanchez's activities, "Briefing about Prime Minister David Cameron interview tonight; just learned that he may disclose some new and interesting information about Barack Obama and the BP Oil Spill," are much more interesting than a friend informing you that he is hopped up on pumpkin-flavored Starbucks. Rick was probably pleasantly surprised when within a few weeks over 75,000 people were following what he was tweeting. He then discovered it was more important to talk less about himself and more about his upcoming interviews. From there, he started to leverage the Twitter platform to ask thought-provoking questions like: "I'm interviewing Colin Powell tonight. What would you like to know most about Iraq or Iran?" Here is a string of tweets from the 2008 Presidential Debate between McCain and Obama:

These examples illustrate why social media is so revolutionary. Rick is able to have a relationship with 75,000 people—they feel more connected with him than they had before he started to leverage the Twitter platform. By responding to Rick's questions, they think they are helping to produce the show, which in many ways they are.

Rick also started following a large percentage (roughly 32,000) of the people following him. "How can he follow so many people?" you astutely ask. He isn't actually keeping tabs on their tweets unless they relate directly to his questions. He is following these people as a courtesy. The etiquette on Twitter is debatable, but many believe that if people follow you, then you should probably follow them. They will never know if you didn't read one of their tweets! If you don't re-follow someone, then you are saying that you have something more important to say than they do, which might not be the impression you wish to convey. The counter argument to this is, if I am a known celebrity or company, am I openly endorsing someone by following him? What happens if that person performs nefarious or lewd actions? Does it reflect poorly on me since I'm following him? This etiquette will flush itself out in time. If you want to be conservative, then limit who you follow; if you want to follow everyone who follows you with the hope of developing a fan base—go for it. Many of these decisions boil down to your appetite for risk versus reward.

Getting back to CNN, the next logical progression was to get them on the show. Obviously, you can't get 75,000 firemen, carpenters, tech nerds, teachers, and the like on the show. Or can you?

So, Rick and his producers started asking the 75,000 followers about their thoughts on various subjects and they put the responses/tweets up on TV during the show on the scrolling byline at the bottom of the screen. This was brilliant because it added content to the show and also encouraged Rick's 75,000 followers to watch just so that they could see if their comment made the show! Remember the local newspaper philosophy: The closer it is to a phone book full of names, the more possible readers you will attract. The same can be said for 75,000 tweets scrolling on CNN.

In a Socialnomic world, companies need to relinquish the total control they have had over the last few centuries and allow users, consumers, viewers, and so on to take their rightful ownership. Rick Sanchez's experiment, which turned into an overnight success, can be summed up in the following tweet from Rick's producers:

The key line in this tweet (message sent on Twitter) being "like i say, it's your show." Credit should go to CNN for allowing Rick to express himself on Twitter. Rick didn't go through any formal training on Twitter, nor did he sit through public relations and brand courses at CNN on what could be said. Rather, CNN let Rick and his producers run with it. Rick was representing CNN, but because of the nature of the technology, the brand chiefs and executives couldn't approve every sentence that Rick was issuing. They had to know that Rick was going to make some mistakes but that he would quickly adjust and move forward. CNN learned from Rick and replicated his success across all their shows and anchors.

Whether Rick Sanchez, Britney Spears, or Lance Armstrong has 75,000 or 1,750,000 followers, they're all "A-Listers." People want to hear what they have to say. It's not because of Twitter; it's because these celebrities previously had a fan base.

Now, there will be a few new A-Listers that result simply from Twitter or microblogging. However, these will be few and far between.

So, what about the rest of us? If we have 1,500 followers, are any of them really listening? I'd argue that most are not. However, it's still a huge marketing tool, and the nobodies are now the new somebodies for the following reasons.

Twitter and other means of microblogging are free. If a local plumber has 1,500 followers, even if most of them aren't likely to be listening at any given moment, as long as at least one person is, that's all that matters. If that one person has a plumbing issue, the plumber now has a shot at new business, especially if the plumber acquired these followers simply by limiting his search.twitter.com query to people within a 25-mile radius. For that plumber, that one listener goes from a nobody to a somebody in a hurry. Twitter has enabled geo-location tools so that if a user has it enabled, you are able to see where that tweet came from—this is a huge help for local businesses.

Some salient uses of microblogging:

And it's the last point—individuals or companies promoting themselves—that may eventually cause Twitter to become tiresome. Is Dale Carnegie rolling over in his grave because everyone on Twitter is trying to be heard, when the key to winning friends and influencing people is actually listening? Some of Twitter's popularity in the beginning was the fact that not everyone was on it, giving it effectiveness and a cool factor. When it becomes flooded with marketing messages, it loses both effectiveness and uniqueness, which may lead many users to abandon Twitter and move on. In fact, a majority of users who sign up for Twitter quickly abandon it. That being said, Twitter and other forms of microblogging will be popular for quite some time. Facebook will definitely make a large play in the near future to have their status updates attempt to replace Twitter by increasing their functionality. There is just too much business being generated.

Smithsonian Student Travel sent more than 6,000 students to Washington, DC, for the presidential inauguration. In the past, it would have been difficult to get major media outlets' attention. However, Twitter made it easy. NPR, MSNBC, and PBS immediately replied to Smithsonian Student Travel's tweets, expressing interest in hearing from middle-school students and teachers.

However, two months after that, I typed in #JetBlue, expressing my concern that their in-flight televisions may not work on my particular flight. This was important to me because I selected JetBlue solely for the purpose of watching March Madness on DirectTV. Instead of hearing tweets, I heard crickets chirping. It's cool when companies and even CEOs respond in real time. This was not the case, however, in this particular instance.

In JetBlue's defense, they're somewhat victims of their own success on Twitter (Morgan Johnston does a fantastic job). People expect the best from them because they've been one of the pioneers. As a result, more people tweet and follow them and it's difficult for them to keep pace. In another instance with JetBlue, there were some massive storms in the Northeast beyond JetBlue's control and their call center was flooded. The average hold time was over an hour. Hence, I turned to Twitter to see what my options were. Unfortunately, they weren't able to respond to these tweets either, but guess who was: some other people who were in the same situation! My flight was scheduled for Sunday out of the SXSW conference before it was abruptly cancelled. Here are some of the helpful tweets I received:

While these tweets were not what I wanted to hear, nor did I hear back from JetBlue, they were very helpful! I was able to stop waiting on hold and take appropriate action. There were 15 other tweets like this since so many people were in a similar situation and had already done the vetting process. This helped eliminate redundancy on my part as well as many others. It also helped free up the phone lines and customer service for JetBlue, as there were other fliers like me who hung up once they were informed via other travelers on Twitter.

In another example, I tweeted an interesting article about Travelocity along with #travelocity and indicated that Travelocity was in deep trouble. Here are the responses I received:

It took me a second to get it, but then I was laughing at this witty retort. Gloria Gaynor's famous disco song is "I Will Survive."

As more people join Twitter, this type of one-to-one relationship will be difficult to maintain. Many celebrities like Britney Spears and Kayne West have "ghost tweeters."

In the future, instead of getting a witty and salient reply from a CEO or well-informed employee, you'll most likely get an uninspired reply from a call center (tweet center?) in New Delhi—if you're lucky enough to get a response at all. Remember, I received no response to my #JetBlue tweet, where I was surprised and delighted by the Travelocity response. Again, to be fair to JetBlue, they are a shining example of a company that is taking social media head on and they are being rewarded. It's not a fluke that they have over 1.7 million followers on Twitter while most of the other airlines, as of the writing of this book, have less than 60,000 followers.

Companies should still microblog, because the upside is still greater than the downside and it's similar to building a robust prospect and user database that you can message when appropriate. It's the modern age database.

During the heyday of Napster, the music industry filed lawsuit after lawsuit about these new file-sharing technologies. While copyrights are important, energy and efforts should have been placed elsewhere. Instead of actions that disenfranchised their customer base (some of the largest numbers of downloaders and sharers were made up of music fanatics), the music industry should have been rejoicing that their distribution, production, and packaging expenses became almost nonexistent!

Music labels could sell direct to customers without the need to pay for packaging, shipping, compact discs, and so on. Some would argue that they didn't embrace the model because of copyright infringement, but the real reason they didn't embrace the model is that they didn't understand it.

By the time they understood the implications of such a runaway hit, it was too late. Apple deftly took a stranglehold of the industry with iTunes. Ironically, the music producers had been giving away free promotional records since the 1950s to radio stations. The music houses understood back then that the more their records got played, the more their sales would increase. Also, think about juke boxes, a very similar concept. Somehow the music labels lost sight of this construct in the digital era. Television executives could also make the same errors as the record labels and find themselves similarly standing on the outside looking in. Let's take a quick look at some developments.

The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics were the most watched games in Olympic history. The opening ceremony was the biggest television event next to the Super Bowl, reaching 34.2 million American viewers, according to Nielsen Ratings.^[104] Michael Phelps' historic swimming captured the nation. The recognition and use of online tools and video by NBC is commendable for that time.

So, did NBC deserve a gold medal for their coverage? On the surface, using old measures, they reached the podium, but they were awarded only fool's gold. Here's why.

It's inevitable that all of our broadcasts will eventually be pushed through the Internet and a majority will be viewed on tablets and iPads. Brand budgets that historically went to television, magazine ads, and outdoor boards are moving to digital channels for three main reasons: (1) the audience has moved there, (2) it's more cost effective, and (3) it's easier to track. What will happen?

In the short term, there will be companies that are able to take advantage of this transition. Just as online travel agent sites like Priceline, Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity were able to take advantage of suppliers (hotels, airlines, cruise lines, rental cars) and make a slow progression to Web bookings, aggressive conduit companies will be able to deliver what the audience wants. The same holds true for Napster, Limewire, and iTunes jumping on the opportunity made available by the ineptness of the music industry to embrace digital music.

At the beginning of 2008, Jeff Zucker, the boss of NBC Universal, told an audience of TV executives that their biggest challenge was to ensure "that we do not end up trading analog dollars for digital pennies."^[105] Zucker understood that the audience was moving online faster than advertisers were, thus leaving media companies in a position of possibly losing advertising revenue and having their inventory devalued if and when they moved online with their television content. In the fourth quarter of 2008, online advertisements in video grew 10.6 percent and went from 2 percent of advertising to 3 percent.^[106]

A good example of the use of this medium was also presented during the 2008 presidential election. Candidates don't care about distribution rights or upsetting their offline sponsors. They only care about getting the word out and making it as easy on their users (in this case, potential voters) to access and consume the information. Through their respective websites, each party streamed high-definition convention coverage around the clock. This forced CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, and the like to do the same. The major networks didn't have time to decide if they would allow the public access—they were losing their audience to these other new distribution channels. This type of intense competition from unexpected places is a harbinger of the future. Who could have ever guessed that our political parties would be more advanced in terms of online video than our television networks?

The way in which we view broadcasts is also changing. In the political convention example, you had the ability to select various cameras to choose how you wanted to view the process. Specifically for the Democratic National Convention, you could have selected: (1) national broadcast angle, (2) side camera, (3) backstage, (4) camera focused on Barack Obama, (5) camera focused on Joe Biden, or (6) camera focused on Michelle Obama.

This ties back to braggadocian and preventative behaviors from Chapters 1 and 2. For example, if you are Michelle Obama, and you are being filmed throughout the entire convention, it's imperative you make certain that you aren't chatting away with your mom during the Speaker of the House's presentation. The upside for the viewer is that it allows for a more intimate relationship with the candidates and their families because viewers can see what they are like off camera.

NBC's Sunday Night Football was one of the first to introduce the idea of these various camera angles. They smartly viewed it as a way to capture online viewers, but also as a way to capture their regular television viewers who had laptops open for an enhanced viewing experience. NBC allowed the users to select various angles on the field as well as select cameras that were only following star players (like Tom Brady or Peyton Manning). The irony is that while NBC didn't excel for the Olympics, they were extremely progressive when it came to their NFL coverage online.

Applying this concept to content-focused shows like ABC's The View could prove to be a further success. Marketers would serve up different product offerings to someone who was viewing via the camera and was fixated on Elisabeth Hasslebeck, versus the viewer who was focused on Whoopi Goldberg.

Real-time data helps dictate content: With devices like TiVo and other digital video recorders (DVRs) in the offline world and YouTube analytics, producers of content are able to get real-time feedback about the content of their shows. If ESPN captures the TiVo/DVR information from their SportsCenter telecasts, and they see that fast-forward or skip rates increase 35 percent during hockey segments, it would behoove them to possibly cut this segment down or eliminate it altogether. They can make these adjustments in real time.

One entity rose quickly based on its ability to recognize the consumer's demand for online video of traditional programs and movies. The site hulu.com formally moved from private beta to product launch in March of 2008. Analysts, reporters, and bloggers panned the effort as Johnny-come-lately because there were several similar options in the marketplace (e.g., Veoh, Joost) and gave Hulu a limited chance at success because it would be weighed down with its commercially supported advertising model.

By September of 2008, Hulu was the sixth most-watched video-content provider on the Web with NielsenOnline reporting 142 million streams and 6.3 million unique monthly visitors.^[107] They were able to surpass such television giants as Disney, MTV, ESPN, and CNN. Much of their success can be attributed to identifying the need for high-production-quality television shows and movies aggregated in one place on the Internet. They were so successful that in October of 2008, YouTube announced that they would start offering more full-length content and original production. In July of 2010 YouTube increased the upload capability for users to 15 minutes, the equivalent to 1/2 a sitcom.

An important part of Hulu's original success was the direct result of their understanding of Socialnomics. They understood that the 8 minutes of advertising that was generally included in a 30-minute sitcom would not be optimal for the user or for the advertiser. So, they went out of their way to ensure their 30-minute programs averaged 2 minutes worth of commercials. How can 2 minutes be better than 8 minutes worth of commercials for the advertiser? It was worth more because the recall was much higher.

"The notion that less is more is absolutely playing out on Hulu," Jason Kilar, the chief executive of the site, said. "This is benefiting advertisers as much as it is benefiting users."^[108]

According to the Insight Express survey, advertisers saw a 22 percent increase in ad recall and a 28 percent increase in intent to purchase. This caused their advertising base to grow from 10 to 110, and clients ranged from McDonald's to BlackBerry.^[109] "I've been waiting for this for 10 years," said Greg Smith, the chief operating officer of Neo@Ogilvy, an interactive agency of the Ogilvy Group.^[110]

In some instances, Hulu users had the ability to select the format in which they receive the advertising. They elect to receive it all in one big chunk—usually movie trailers—or have it spread out in the typical format. The typical format for a 30-minute TV spot starts with a 30-second upfront "brought to you by," a 30-second commercial at the midway point, and then a closing commercial. Another social piece that was pure genius was that Hulu would indicate how long the commercial would be. Users don't have the ability to fast forward through commercials, but if they know it's only a 30-second commercial break, what are the odds of them getting up from where they are watching—not likely. The user likes this sense of control, and it echoes avid Internet video-fan Mary:

Mr. Kilar of Hulu couldn't agree more: "We think that a modest amount of advertising is the right thing because that's going to drive atypical results for marketers."^[112] A survey conducted by ABC also supported this notion—seeing that only running one advertisement during a 30-minute program generated an astounding 54 percent recall rate.^[113]

The format was well conceived for the user and for the advertiser. Users are appreciative that sponsors are helping to provide them with free television in these types of new formats. In a survey conducted by Hulu and Insight Express, 80 percent of the viewers rated their experiences on hulu.com as good to excellent.^[114] Users are less tolerant of commercials on cable and satellite services because they are already paying over $100/£60 for the service. Whereas on sites like Hulu, users are most appreciative of the sponsor, because when they hear that the program was brought to them by McDonald's, they know they owe McDonald's some gratitude for making it available online for free. This same message sounds hollow to the viewer via traditional broadcast television.

This is the same concept that television embraced back in the 1950s. However, over time they kept putting the advertiser ahead of the real client—the viewer. This marginalized the viewer experience, which in turn impaired the advertiser and eventually the broadcaster. Alarm bells should ring when the technology product winner of the year (TiVo) is a direct attempt to circumvent your service offering. Instead of fighting legal battles to stop such technology, advertisers should take the Socialnomic approach of understanding that something in the chain is broken and must be addressed.

Contrast this with a site like Hulu, where 93 percent of respondents to the Insight Express survey (18,000 surveyed) said they felt they were receiving the right amount of advertising for the free content they were enjoying. A large percentage of the sample even expressed that there could be more advertising. An estimated 14.3 million viewed the first Tina Fey "Palin Skit" on Hulu, while only 10.2 million viewed the September 13, 2008, episode on television. Of course, Hulu's numbers usually benefited from the same user viewing it more than once. The September 27, 2008, skit attracted 10.1 million views on Hulu and 7.9 million views on television.^[115]

Due to the popularity, Hulu actually needed more advertising, not to compensate for lost revenue but to enhance the user experience. Similar to CNET's Buzz Out Loud podcast example with Best Buy, it's important for the advertising to stay as fresh as the content. You can't serve up the same ad to the same viewer 20 times. The beauty of it being pumped through the Internet is that sites and broadcasters have insight into how many times a viewer saw an ad, while historically this has been something of a guessing game at best for the television ad community.

The executives of Hulu understand that sites like theirs are just as social as a Wikipedia, MySpace, or Facebook. That is why they have allowed users to give commercials thumbs-up or thumbs-down ratings.

Hulu's initial success is probably not sustainable, and there were indications in mid-2010 that content providers were losing favor and wanted to take back control of their content. However, Hulu and other sites like it contribute to moving us toward a more Socialnomic way of viewing our favorite video content from anywhere. It's analogous to Napster and Apple pushing the music industry and Priceline, Orbitz, and Expedia doing the same in the travel industry. Disruptive technology may not be sustainable in the short-term but it pushes everyone in the proper direction for the long-term. Do you own a landline? When's the last time you purchased a full music album? The television industry is on its way to massive change.

SlingCatcher is a product that allows users to access their home-cable-fed programming from anywhere in the world. This complements their popular Slingbox device that allows travelers to set up a small box in their hotel rooms (or anywhere outside their homes) to be able to watch their regular programs and DVR from what is being delivered to their homes. This is very convenient for the international traveler who doesn't want to watch a Spanish Novela or a French cooking show when traveling abroad.

Hulu's success may be short-lived; only time will tell. But at a minimum, they understood the customer needs of their space and forced the industry to move in a new direction. As Kevin McGurn, Hulu's Vice President of National Sales pointed out at an OMMA panel:

Another item to consider in understanding why TV will quickly move to Internet pipes is the sociability. If you are watching a particular game, you will be able to easily inform your social network and invite other fans to join you. You will then have the ability to comment and chat real time, thereby allowing you to be connected to the tailgate in Columbus, Ohio, even though you are sitting in San Diego, California.

The end winner here will be the consumer because these innovative tools and companies, no matter if they last or not, will bring new ideas to the table and change the way that we as consumers have been trained to accept broadcast media.

We started to see a glimpse of this in April of 2010 during CBS's broadcast of the Masters. They had online streaming of the event in high definition. It was full coverage for the first two days and then for the last two days you had your choice of four holes to watch. You also had the choice to follow only the lead group. Again, it wasn't quite all the way there, because why wouldn't you show the entire thing? It's all about distributing your product. The more people see your product, the more people see your client's advertising. As technology becomes cheaper and cheaper, it's conceivable that you could follow only the player in whom you are interested. This could have dramatic effects on the ratings. Today, if the player you like is in 15th place, unless his name is Tiger Woods, he most likely will get zero airtime. However, if you are given the choice to follow any player you like, then it truly changes the game.

In many instances, when people are at work the only option they have for watching an event is via the Internet. Also, more and more people are choosing to forgo an expensive monthly cable bill and they make do with simply their Internet connection. This should sound oddly reminiscent of a trend that happened about 10 years ago—people started to not have a landline in their house or apartment; rather they got by with their mobile phone. The same could happen in the television industry.

Most likely we can anticipate some intense legal battles in Washington, because the foreseen problem is that many of the suppliers of cable television are also the suppliers of the Internet connection! If Time Warner or Comcast starts to see more and more people cut their $100 monthly cable television bill, they could react by increasing the fee for the Internet connection or set up pricing models to charge per stream—they have attempted this before in some markets. The consumer can only hope that competitors and alternatives for high-speed Internet emerge or that policies are put in place to obstruct cable companies from implementing such policies. This is part of what the net neutrality discussions are all about.

Circling back to the 2009 Masters: On the final two days, CBS showed only four holes. A few years from now we will be in a much better place. I would predict that not only will there be full coverage over the Internet, but that the viewer will be able to select which hole, or which player, they would like to watch. The power will be in the user's hands, which is where it should be.

A great example of a situation companies want to try and avoid involves Hasbro and two entrepreneurs from India. Quickly identifying the potential of the Facebook application platform, two young programmers in India, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, thought there might be interest from people playing Scrabble against each other across the globe. They couldn't find an acceptable version of Scrabble to play online so they decided to create their own. They named it "Scrabulous" as a direct reflection of the game (Scrabble) that they were adapting. Scrabulous co-creator Jayant Agarwalla indicated he sent a letter to Hasbro in January 2008 asking for permission to use the trademarked Scrabble template. He never heard back, and took that as permission to go ahead with his program.

There was more than enough interest with over 500,000 daily users at its peak. The application became one of the top-10 most-used applications on Facebook,^[117] and during a 2008 interview on CBS's 60 Minutes, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg even mentioned that he enjoyed playing against his grandparents. Speaking of grandparents, it was estimated that 40 percent of the players were over 50 years old, which proves what we've been saying throughout this book—social media is for everyone. Who knew that such an old game would be so enormously popular in this digital age?

When the Agarwalla brothers eventually heard back from Hasbro, they were issued a cease-and-desist letter and a lawsuit was filed against them for copyright violation. At first glance, you could argue that Hasbro/Mattel took the logical route in protecting what they rightfully own by suing Scrabulous for copyright infringement. However, it is apparent that they may have missed the bigger picture and, better yet, the opportunity to capitalize on the existing user base who likely associated Scrabulous with the makers of Scrabble anyway. We can't help but wonder if the legal cost and negative publicity have simply washed away the potential profits that Scrabulous was freely providing Hasbro/Mattel. So it would seem that rather than suing the online game's creators, Hasbro could have formed a partnership with them or bought them out.

"But in today's fast-changing social networking environment, Hasbro's lawsuit and its attempt to control its online image may not be the right move," said Peter Fader, co-director of the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative. He believes Hasbro's action is an "incredibly bad business decision." There is no evidence that the Agarwalla brothers were doing "something absolutely disparaging" to the Scrabble brand. In fact, Scrabulous has been such a fabulously good thing for the Scrabble franchise [that] Hasbro should have been celebrating."^[118]

"It is not clear if Hasbro did the right thing by going after Scrabulous," chimed Kevin Werbach, Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics. "Many copyright owners today are over-inclusive as they try to assert their rights. The question for Hasbro is whether the benefit they get in terms of direct and indirect revenue from their own Scrabble game exceeds the cost of negative publicity from this action. But it certainly got them a black eye in the online community, although most people who play Scrabble have no idea this has happened."^[119]

In the dismantling process, on the morning of July 29, users were abruptly denied access to the Scrabulous application on Facebook. If positioned correctly, Hasbro could have capitalized and made a strategic move with an introduction of their own Online Scrabble. Had Hasbro been ready to launch their internal electronic Scrabble application, the transition would have been almost seamless to the user, and Hasbro would have continued to profit from the free Scrabulous publicity. Instead, users found that the Hasbro Scrabble application was jammed with glitches, extremely slow to load, and the variety of word selection (the basis of Scrabble) was poor compared to any Webster's dictionary.

You could argue that those who really lost out from this ugly episode are both the end users, who were left a little in limbo during the transition, and Hasbro, who had some upset fans as a result of the transition:

The numbers also took an immediate hit. At the launch of Hasbro's official version of online Scrabble, the game attracted fewer than 2,000 daily Facebook users compared to the more than half a million players a day worldwide on Scrabulous. Another issue with the new application was that there were various groups holding the rights from country to country. So, for the main Scrabble game, it was no longer a global game, but only for U.S. and Canadian citizens. Mattel owned the rights to many of the other countries. What a great benefit for society, millions of people connecting with others across the globe to play an educational game like Scrabble. The Agarwalla brothers may well have been on their way to a Nobel Peace Prize (admittedly a stretch) before Hasbro spoiled the fun. To be fair, the Agarwalla brothers were pocketing an estimated $25,000 a month from Scrabulous.^[121]

According to Fader, many companies sue "just because they think they have the right to, instead of pursuing what's in their shareholders' best interests." It is "irrelevant if Hasbro was right or not" in its copyright claims against the backdrop of how Scrabble benefited from Scrabulous, he says. "The downside they have created for themselves and others is a lack of an upside."^[122]

Companies "need to move aside from knee-jerk tendencies to bring in legal action," he adds, noting that Hasbro had other options besides suing. "It would have been smart to pay (the Agarwalla brothers) millions of dollars. That would have been minuscule compared to legal fees and their own application development expenses... . Hasbro may have won the battle but it has surely lost the war."^[123]

If there is a lesson to be learned from all this, it would be that it is best to weigh your options (like TripAdvisor did with Cities I've Visited) before jumping in to claim what is rightfully yours. Take advantage of others who have already done the legwork to help you position your brand throughout the social media space. Think strategically before exposing your brand. Hasbro failed to anticipate the speed at which users would react to the abolition of Scrabulous and the introduction of Online Scrabble. They could have favorably capitalized on the work done by the Agarwalla brothers, but instead chose to fight the battle uphill. Behind the scenes they may have tried this, and to be fair to Hasbro, perhaps the path they chose was the only viable one legally. Whatever the case, all of this translated into the Scrabble name being dragged into unflattering associations: lawsuit, popular application banned, and so forth.

However, Hasbro and Scrabble did eventually make their way through and kudos to them—and Scrabble on Facebook today has over 900,000 monthly users. A question that we may never know the answer to is, could this whole ugly situation have been avoided?

Because social media lends itself to unobtrusive advertising, that advertising is effective. In a 2008 survey done by Razorfish—"The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report"—76 percent of the 1,006 people surveyed said they didn't mind seeing ads when they logged-in to Facebook, MySpace, or other social media sites. Razorfish also found that 40 percent of the respondents said they made purchases after seeing those ads.^[124]

Intuitively this makes sense because social media can accomplish things that we weren't necessarily able to do in the past. For example, when my friend changed her status from "In a Relationship" to engaged, she started getting ads for wedding photographers, DJs, and so on. This was information that she didn't necessarily view as advertising, but rather part of the experience—and a helpful part at that.

Smart companies like TripAdvisor understand this technique and approach the market from an outside-in viewpoint rather than from the old inside-out paradigm. ACME Travel was using inside-out thinking and old metrics. They approached the opportunity of Facebook from the perspective of "How can we grow our database so that we can mail potential customers brochures and send them e-mail?" Actually, the question that companies should ask first is "What do we have to offer that is unique and valuable to our customers and potential customer base?" Also, engaging in role-playing in which you put yourself in the shoes of your users is always extremely beneficial. As a user would I take the extra step of giving you my personal information? Only if what the company is offering is valuable enough to me that I choose to forfeit my personal information.

Users generally want to be communicated with through the medium in which you met to begin with. In this example, TripAdvisor knows that they will be communicating through the user's Facebook inbox or Facebook news feed, not via traditional e-mail or brochures. At some point during the relationship, if the user wants to sign up for an e-mail distribution, then TripAdvisor will be more than happy to accommodate them.

A few months after the travel application battle, ACME Travel was discussing a different Facebook tactic, establishing a fan page. A fan page is usually for your company or product home page within Facebook. Facebook users can select a simple "+" symbol, and they are added as fans so that they can receive updates in their news feeds for anything going on with that product or service. There was a heated debate about what adjustments they should make to the fan page prior to a large e-mail drop that was going to deploy later that week. For several weeks, ACME showcased two products on their fan page. The various product managers were arguing about which product should be placed higher on the page and how many outbound links they should have driving to lead forms. This is a classic example of a traditional marketing pitfall; people arguing for months over the color of a car to be featured in an upcoming commercial, or disputing if a URL should be printed as www.company.com or http://www.company.com in the next edition of a magazine ad. Sound familiar? This type of behavior is nonstrategic and wastes energy because the decisions are not being driven by consumers of the product or service.

Fortunately for ACME, the marketing director sat patiently quiet while the quarreling continued and finally intervened with the following:

The meeting room went silent when this was expressed. The meeting was over shortly thereafter. In the past, employees alluded to the fact that meetings had gone on for hours resulting in a poor decision or even a compromise. With the advent of social media, this type of discussion ceases to exist. Business decisions become more about letting the user decide what's important. As discussed at the beginning of this section, this is commonly referred to as outside-looking-in thinking versus the traditional inside-looking-out thinking, and it is becoming necessary with regard to social media.

More and more companies will be developing content in the form of Webisodes (five-minute episodes that could be a series), applications, and widgets. Money historically spent on media will be spent to develop and promote this varying content.

Sometimes, this content will be developed from the ground up by the companies themselves—think soap operas on steroids. A good example of this is EF Educational Tours 2009 Web series "Life On Tour." It's a story of six students who go on a tour abroad. It's produced by Bunim/Murray Productions, best known for their MTV "Real World" series. There is no overt marketing placement in the show itself except at the end with a small EF logo. While on the tour abroad, teenagers can chat with the cast members on their Facebook page.

Advertising will be less about social media campaigns and more about an ongoing conversation.

Other times, the idea or content will already have been produced, and companies will join forces, often with individuals who may go from being a nobody to a somebody overnight because of the power of the social graph.

How do companies know what the next great thing is? How do they avoid missing out on a great opportunity without overexposing themselves? Some argue that given the speed of technology, companies should try everything; they should throw a bunch of small tests out against the proverbial wall and see what sticks. If budgets and resources were not at the forefront of profitability, this would make sense. But with the importance of watching every dollar and companies trying to increase their return on investments, a more strategic approach should be taken. For example, if your company is about to plunge into social media, it's best to understand fundamentals as they relate to:

The best way to look at these five pillars is through an example: Summer Cheerleading Camp.

Donnelly and Coke went ahead and invested some serious dollars into hiring a consulting company to help them get up and running on Second Life. If it didn't feel right, then why would you go ahead and invest in it?

According to Joseph Plummer, chief research officer at the Advertising Research Foundation:

Another important piece in this Second Life example is to take a step back and truly assess the potential upside. It's easy to have your vision blurred by hype and propaganda. In this Second Life instance, Wired magazine points out what the opportunity really was:

How do companies find the right balance between launching every possible idea through the door and ensuring they are not missing out on a great opportunity? If you have been paying attention, for success as a company in today's world it is critical to:

Worse than making a Second Life mistake is doing nothing. As Irish poet George Bernard Shaw once said, "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing." Even so, there are still a large number of companies that have been slow to embrace and benefit from social media.

As a company, you don't necessarily need to be the first to move, so don't feel like you've completely missed the boat if your company hasn't done anything to address social media. Sometimes it's prudent to sit back, and watch and learn from some of the more nimble players in the space. In social media, small businesses are sometimes the best to watch and imitate. Many of them have already waded in and learned some valuable lessons from their successes and their mistakes.

Imagine if you were a mortgage lender and could go back in time to 1999 and optimize your home page for the query "Low Finance Rate." Would you do it? Of course you would. Well, the same opportunity exists today with social networks. Let's assume that the owner of Cathy's Creative Mugs (a fictitious small business) wants to post a fan page on Facebook, essentially a company promotional flyer. When prompted by the Facebook interface to name her fan page, she begins to type "Cathy's Creative Mugs," but then realizes she can probably leverage search engine optimization (SEO) best practices here. So instead, she names this page "Coffee Mugs," which is a rich keyword for her industry.

This will help Cathy return searches on "coffee mugs" within Facebook, as well as boost her rankings in the traditional search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

In many of the social media pieces, the first few years will be a "land grab of opportunity." Just like in the search world, if you were a savvy website back in the late 1990s and ranked high for major keywords like "mortgage loans," "cheap travel," "wedding favors," and the like, you made out like a bandit. If you are one of the savvy first movers, in the first few years in social media you could set yourself up for some hefty revenue streams down the road. A good case in point is for fan pages on Facebook. There is a fan page for chocolate milk that as of April of 2010 had over 1.9 million fans! This type of passion should peak the interests of companies like Nestle, Hershey's, and Ghirardelli. As of the writing of this book, Facebook was attempting to make "communities" rather than "fan pages" for items such as this in an effort to help major brands stand out a little more from the clutter. Case in point being that Coke has over 5 million fans, but there are also 500 other Facebook Fan Pages for Coke. Facebook also made the decision to change "become a fan" to "like" a particular brand.

While as a company you can sit back and learn, you better not take too long to do it—you need to launch and learn. Companies that still think they control whether they "do" social media or not are terribly mistaken. Companies don't have a choice on whether they do social media; they have a choice in how well they do it. If you're a large brand, you can rest assured that there are conversations, pages, and applications constantly being developed around your brand and by the community at large. The community is "doing" social media even if you choose not to.

This is very different from e-mail, search, banner ads, television ads, radio ads, outdoor signs, and so forth. In all those instances, companies had a choice regarding whether or not to engage. If they didn't want to buy paid search ads or a television spot, that choice was up to the company. With social media, they don't have a choice, because consumers and others will do something around your brand without you.

Want proof? Let's take a look at a Web 2.0 product like a lawnmower. If you performed a search within Facebook in August of 2008 for "John Deere," you'd see:

This is a great example, because:

Who has the power now: John Deere or the kid who posted the "I love John Deere" group? Just like the person who started the chocolate milk page, in this instance, the kid has the power. After all, what's to stop this kid from posting a nice static image of a special offer for a competitor like Caterpillar on his site? Money talks, and this could be a cheap purchase for Caterpillar to a highly specialized target audience.

As of June 2009, John Deere wised up and started a fan page, and they now have 65,000 fans, which Facebook in 2010 changed from fan pages to simply pages and changed fans to "likes."

Many of these constructs are similar to SEO best practices. The company that puts in the time will see the payoff.

Another reason a company may decide to do nothing? They don't want to aggregate their hard-earned customers in a public forum because they're afraid the competition will come in and pick them off.

This might be a valid concern, as many companies crawl and scrape the Internet looking for client names of their competitors so they can poach them through various sales methods. If your fans and enemies in the social networks weren't doing anything without you, then maybe it could be a valid strategy to be safe and not aggregate your clients or fans all in one place. But, as evidenced by the John Deere example, they're out there, mobilizing around your brand. They are far from doing nothing, so you need to join the conversation. Also, if your customers are that easy to pick off, you have likely failed to build brand equity or produce a great product or service and thus probably have much bigger issues to address than your social media efforts being easily viewed by the competition. The beauty of social media is that it will point out your company's flaws; the key question is "how quickly will you address these flaws?"

Some of these concepts are difficult to grasp, but when you choose to do nothing, it's analogous to a shepherd (company) watching over his flock of sheep (customers/users). In this analogy, a fence breaks, and the sheep suddenly have access to a new pasture (social media). More than a few wander into this new pasture because it has a lot to offer. The shepherd (company) is uncertain about what to do and decides not to go into this new pasture to find his sheep. What's most likely to occur? Sheep may get eaten by a wolf (competition), or they may get lost (customers frustrated that they can't find what they're looking for). There is no doubt that if the shepherd herds the sheep into a flock, the wolf (competition) has a better idea of where the sheep are.

However, in a flock, even though the sheep are all in one easy-to-find place, the sheep are less vulnerable because there is safety in numbers and the wolf is less likely to attack. Also, if an attack were to occur, the shepherd will be well aware of what occurred and can better prevent it in the future. If the shepherd were to have done nothing, when the fence broke his sheep would be getting eaten by wolves, getting lost, and falling off cliffs, and he wouldn't have a clue until he went out to find them—and by then it would have been too late. Even if you decide not to herd your sheep, you should be in the new pasture helping to guide your sheep away from dangerous cliffs and waterfalls.

As a company, you need to be aware of the wolf and proactive to any reaction the wolf may have. There is no question that your competition will be out culling the Web for information that will help give them an advantage (looking for potential customer names, pricing, etc.). Transparency is definitely a two-way street. While it is great for the customer, it is also great for your competition.

As a company, you should also be out culling for information to give you an advantage. While it may win you new customers, it should also alert you to how the competition is grabbing your information. This will give you ideas on how to safeguard where you can divulge information and where the downside outweighs the benefit. As discussed in another section in this book, if your customers are that easy to pick off, then you don't have a problem with your social media or online strategy, you have a problem with your product.