 Transcript of Jeremiah Owyang Interview
For what it's worth, this was one of my favorite podcasts (and I've done 40-50 of them). Click here to listen to this podcast.
| Aaron Strout: |
Good afternoon. My name is Aaron Strout, and I the VP of new media at Mzinga, a leading provider of community and business social networks. I’m joined today by a guest who is a Web strategist, blogger extraordinaire, and soon-to-be Forrester analyst, Jeremiah Owyang. Welcome, Jeremiah. |
| Jeremiah Owyang: |
Thanks, Aaron. |
| Aaron Strout: |
So we have a few topics I’d like to cover today, the first of which I think is I was just mentioning to you in our pre-conversation, your blogging capabilities amaze me. I blog a fair amount myself, and you crank these things out and they’re not only good quality posts, but I mean you put a lot of meat behind them. Can you talk a little bit about your process? I think you have sort of a cool way approaching it. |
| Jeremiah Owyang: |
Right. Well my brain is constantly turning about Web strategy. Web strategy basically is how do companies use the Web to connect with customers? I’m always thinking about this because that’s been my career passion, that’s what I started doing right after college and I continue to do it. It’s kind of funny. I sleep in short bursts. I sleep in two three-hour segments during the night. I get up in the middle of the night, and all of a sudden my mind is triggered and I start writing, and I just put these ideas down or these processes.
What I do is I just work on posts – all of these meaty posts. I have about 150 posts in draft right now. Some of them get published, some of them never do, or some of them I just work on very slowly. I just build these strategies – |
| Aaron Strout: |
So – |
| Jeremiah Owyang: |
Do you have a question? |
| Aaron Strout: |
Your wife must love you when you get up every couple hours in the middle of the night? |
| Jeremiah Owyang: |
She’s a heavy sleeper. She doesn’t even know. (Laughter) |
| Aaron Strout: |
Oh, that’s perfect. |
| Jeremiah Owyang: |
I just keep on working on these things, and basically they’re based upon what have I done when I’ve deployed these things at Hitachi as the community manager, or working with all of these companies now as a consultant, or where I’m headed. I basically want to help people, and that’s what these posts are about: How can I help you using these tools? |
| Aaron Strout: |
Well that’s great. Tell me, what is your inspiration for these? I mean I’m sure it’s a number of different things, but certainly we were just at Office 2.0 together, you know, is it conferences or forums, or un-conferences that inspire you? Conversations with people? Podcasts? Where do you look for your inspiration? |
| Jeremiah Owyang: |
Probably when I talk to people that are actually deploying it, and looking at those specific problems that they’re having. That’s where the real information is at. You know, people that are in the trenches, in the roles, that have to convince management that a blog is a good idea, and trying to help them overcome these things. I’m writing for those corporate folks who are trying to do these things. That’s who I care about. |
| Aaron Strout: |
Very cool. Without giving away too many secrets, what do you use for your analysis? Now I know this is slightly shifting into our next topic, which is Facebook. You’re I’d say one of the foremost experts, if you could say there is one, in terms of business strategy with Facebook, and I know you write a lot about it. We talked some about it out at the conference. You had some great analysis there that obviously you had gone in just by looking at – this is a blog about Wal-Mart versus Target, and their presence in Facebook and how they were doing. There’s certain metrics that you cover, which I thought were great metrics; wall post, a number of contributors, you know, photos uploaded, things like that, but you do have very meaty posts. Where else do you find this content that you use for your analysis? |
| Jeremiah Owyang: |
Well it comes from a lot of different sources. What I do every Wednesday is I publish a social networking industry digest, and I basically collect all the links during the week about social networking usage, segmentation, productivity – or lack thereof – and I just create these lists. You can go to my blog and click “digest” and find that. That’s my way of actually collecting data and information. My blog is actually a filter for my job. I’m collecting all this information, I start internalizing it so I can keep track of the numbers.
Secondly, I wrote a white paper recently with Dow Jones on social media measurement. As you know, social media is measured much differently than the traditional Web analytics, or of the previous era, so I’m looking at different ways to measure these things. Another way I get information is I actually email Facebook themselves, and I identify who I am and I say, “I’d love media information. Give me data. Give me advertising information, demographics,” and they send it to me. I start putting these things together, and I start seeing the trends. I compare things, and then I just make analysis and then I make recommendations. Then it spreads, and usually the teams involved – I know that Target and Wal-Mart have been reading my blog since that, including their PR firms, and they have been somewhat involved. It’s been very interesting to just initiate that conversation. The best thing is is to involve the community, because “we” IS smarter than “me,” right?
They talk back in the comments, or they put stuff in their blog and we’ve come up with some great solutions that I didn’t even think about. For example, here’s an example of “we” is smarter than “me,” the problem with Wal-Mart may not be the way they deploy their Web site in Facebook, but the fact that they don’t have a real, authentic evangelist, and that’s what people started saying in the comments as I talked about earlier. |
| Aaron Strout: |
That’s very cool. Having shifted gears into the Facebook space, you are speaking, I believe, at the upcoming Web Community Forum in Seattle this year, and you’re the keynote there. |
| Jeremiah Owyang: |
Right. |
| Aaron Strout: |
How did you get interested in Facebook? Talk a little bit about the importance that you see Facebook playing in various companies’ roles going forward. |
| Jeremiah Owyang: |
Well I noticed Facebook was gonna make a difference because of all the business people that have started to go there, and then I started to see the demographic information. It’s people that are educated, above 18, but the highest growth rate is above 30. White-collar workers, educated, middle class people are starting to join these things, and this is where you can find all the technology influencers. When I saw this demographic shift, I knew it was gonna happen. Then they turned on the API feature, so anybody could deploy a widget there using their API development kit, and that means there’s a whole other platform sitting on top of it.
When you look a little bit lower underneath the covers, you’ll see that this is a marketer’s dream. There is a tremendous amount of information that people are giving out; their personal information, their preferences, what gender do they like to date, what is their status, where do they live, what company do they work at, what’s their role. On top of that, they say who are they connected to, who are those friends? When you start putting that profile network information together, it’s a very rich model of information. There’s a tremendous amount of data there. When you start putting all these things together, you start to see this is an extreme opportunity, and there’s many ways for brands to get involved and start doing stuff in there. |
| Aaron Strout: |
Now one follow-up question. You mentioned specifically in the post yesterday Target and Wal-Mart, and from the way you positioned the post, it sounded like Target was clearly the leader. I think that was not a huge surprise given the fact that I think they do have an evangelist and they’re a little more customer-friendly than Wal-Mart is. Who else is doing a good job? Is there one or two other companies that you can think of that it’s, “Wow, these guys really have their act together with Facebook and what they’re doing in there”? |
| Jeremiah Owyang: |
Noxzema has deployed a sponsor group, and it’s around beauty tips for a certain demographic. Jeep has one around campers and camping, which is very clever. There’s a lot of different other widgets that are deployed inside of there, too. I took a count yesterday of all the sponsored groups, and there’s I think 500 brands in there that have already deployed, so there’s a lot of different cases of success. Oh, here’s a great example: Ernst & Young. They have a sponsored group, which means they pay I think up to $100,000.00 to control the look and feel, but it’s designed to hire new consultants out of college. They found the right demographic, and there’s I think 14,000 users, or something like that. I know there’s a lot. They’re very active inside of it. It’s been deployed pretty well. |
| Aaron Strout: |
Well that’s good to know, and they would definitely not be one of the companies that I would expect to have figured it out but kudos to them for doing that. Moving onto the final question – I would love to talk to you for probably an hour, but I want to keep it short for your sake and for the audience’s sake. You are moving over to the analyst world, and I think, as we were talking about, this may be a first, where a blogger or Web strategist turns analyst. What sort of motivated you to do this and what are you looking forward to as an analyst versus being a standalone Web strategist and blogger? |
| Jeremiah Owyang: |
Yeah, this is exciting. As far as I know, I’m the first social media practitioner to become an analyst, which is interesting. The area I will be covering will be social media. Forrester calls it social computing for the interactive marketer. It’s pretty much what I’ve been doing already. Currently in my day job at PodTech I help our clients as a consultant. I do strategic thought leadership on the blog, so that will now be covered for Forrester in analysis and market data. I get out there and speak and talk to the press, and that’s the same thing at Forrester, so it won’t be too different at all. There are a lot of other analyst firms that actually lock up the analysts’ blogs only to paying customers. Well that’s not gonna happen with me. I’m gonna continue to be sharing online, continuing to do meaty posts, and really try to help the community, help the Web strategists out there. This is really gonna further mission. I’m excited. |
| Aaron Strout: |
Well it’s great, and I look forward to that because I’m actually personally a big fan of Forrester’s. But you’re right, a lot of other analyst groups do lock their content, so you going there is a little bit contrary, which is nice and I think you’re gonna do wonderful things there, certainly with a team of Charlene and Josh and company. Thank you, again, for being with us today. For those listening in, this is Jeremiah Owyang, again, Web strategist, blogger, and soon-to-be Forrester analyst. Thank you for joining us, Jeremiah. |
| Jeremiah Owyang: |
Aaron, thank you. It’s my pleasure. |
| Aaron Strout: |
For those of you listening in, there are other podcasts like this on the WeAreSmarterThanMe.org site. We look forward to you listening to them. Thanks so much. |
Wed, Sep 12 2007 |
Blogs
