I unfollowed @PV_at_SAP today.

Along with @outdoorrussia, @CarinaAllen and 20 others. At least, so said a tweet from @PV_at_SAP caught by my mentions column yesterday afternoon:

“@Reaburn , @outdoorrussia , @CarinaAllen and 20 others unfollowed me today ... checked by http://fllwrs.com”

An interesting way to mention someone. Of course, it was entirely possible. I do unfollow people from time to time. So I checked, and actually, I had unfollowed @PV_at_SAP the day prior, making the mention ever so slightly inaccurate.

It's not the first time I’ve unfollowed someone. But it is the first time I’ve been called out for it, and I’m not quite sure of the purpose. My guess is that “PV” wants to alert the twitterverse that someone isn’t playing by the implied reciprocity rules.

Interesting take on the purpose & use for twitter. Yes, building one's self-perceived popularity through masses of followers is one potential source of value for Twitter, though it’s not where I find value, and in all fairness, I doubt PV does either.

For me, Twitter’s value is in engaging experts, leaders & interesting people on subjects I want to learn more about, contributing to the collaborative dialogue where I can, while creating a shortcut to exceptional content for which the search cost would be too high for me to ever obtain it on my own.

Right now, I’m near the magical 2,000 twitter followers, so Twitter demands that I watch my balance of follows to followers. I’m trying to break through that mark, not because I want access to legions of potential pseudofans, but because I’m pretty certain there are more than 2,000 people out there that I’m going to find interesting, and I want to be able to find & follow them with fewer restrictions.

PV isn’t following me, and so he’s limiting my Twitter experience by hampering that objective. I also don’t find much value in his content – nothing personal, it’s just not for me.

Any customer-customer interaction can change behavior in the service environment. In this case, unfollowing PV was my way of improving my own experience, since PV wasn’t contributing to it, and actually was limiting its effectiveness.

I’m sure PV would understand. After all, his bio reads “Its all about the Customer and the Experience at SAP.” It’s a sentiment I share (it was likely a reason I chose to follow PV in the first place), and exactly what I was practicing when I unfollowed him.

Welcome to the age of co-creation.

It was hardly coincidental that a 140-character message from like-minded service tweep Barry Dalton launched a post on co-creation of service experiences.

He had suggested risk in the proliferation of customer communities for products and services, in that they potentially put the message, delivery and operation of the service out of ‘corporate control’. Further, inaccurate usage information from the customer community could actually create service / product failures.

Barry’s astute observation is part of a developing shift, with both tremendous risk and opportunity, around the experience co-creation that the web in general and social media in particular has enabled.

Customer co-creation is a critical part of any experience. Whether it requires a low level of customer input or deep co-production on the part of the customer, the critical component for a service experience to work is that customers both know their role and are enabled by the service provider to perform it.

In that regard, the internet and social media is almost entirely about co-creation.

Internet channels were first used as ecommerce channels and self-service sites – simple forms of co-creation of a purchase or service experience. But co-creation has developed beyond those simple applications, with service / product user communities, on-demand video “how-to” capabilities, and deep product & service reviews assisting pre-through-post-purchase interactions. With help now everywhere, customers are developing a better understanding of their role than ever before.

At the far end of the spectrum, Twitter and Facebook enable the experience directly through their technology and the aggregation of the networks. Then they get out of the way and let the customers do the rest. Users self-align based on shared interest, debate & advance knowledge subjects self-chosen, and largely self-police the community. With a large number of social media outlets, customer co-creation is the product (service).

The result? Social Media is enabling experience co-creation in ways never before thought of. Customers are becoming higher performers through self education, peer-assisted education through vast user communities, and the proliferation of online service channels.

This shift can be scary. The company now hands a large portion of control back over to the consumers, where the product or service usage information may be incorrect. But tightly linked user communities mean that the information is fairly contained. If it isn’t self policed by other users, the opportunity still exists for the company to monitor and correct misinformation. It makes the product or service stronger to have a user community of 3rd party commentators, even if not every comment is positive.

This shift can also be liberating. Users are developing self service capabilities never dreamed of. As customers become more highly productive in their use of services, they make the company more productive. As their part in delivery increases, so too can their level of satisfaction with a successful outcome. Users have more of a direct hand in the service / product development than ever before, enabling the companies to inexpensively tap into the collective knowledge of those who care most about it.

Customers are already moving on this, so co-creation of your experience is not a choice. The only decisions companies face is how much they can enable, how productive customers can be, and what development they can take away to make the experience that much better.

Thanks for the follow!

Twitter is a service model build entirely on the strength of the relationships of the community. They’ve enabled the conversation with technology, and effectively stepped aside to let the users completely co-produce the experience. Very few companies have the courage (or the ability) to get out of the way and let clients produce the experience, and in that regard, Twitter (and social media) is revolutionary for us all.

But as with all co-creation efforts, if the co-creators have different agenda, they can subvert the experience, undermine its overall effectiveness and leave people feeling unsatisfied.

Ironically, it is the marketing people that are doing this on Twitter. The people who advocate building close, one-to-one relationships with customers, are, by their actions doing the opposite – resorting to the mindless bullhorn as an attention grabber.

When I choose to follow someone, it’s because they’ve either said something interesting or are mentioned or referenced by someone in my existing network. In other words, through direct advertising or word-of-mouth, I’m saying I’m committed to trial of what you have to contribute to my experience.

Sometimes I get followed back. Great. Reciprocity is a good thing, though it’s no loss if I’m not. Other times, I get an auto-generated direct message, something along the lines of “Thanks for following. I'm a tech blogger making money from blogging and tweeting. DM me anytime.” or, “Thanks for the follow, I look forward to Tweeting with you. Check out my website and let me know how I can help.”

That’s at least a warning sign, and depending on the message, may be enough to get me to unfollow. I haven't reported anyone yet, only because I've been too lazy to read up on the ettiquette. I'm sure I've had the opportunity.

Instead of purposefully building a relationship to contribute meaningful context in areas I’m interested in, they use automated tools to expand their reach, make themselves seem more personal than they are, and setting me up for what they're selling me next.

It’s the very behavior we rail against – marketers casting a wide enough net to live off of the trickle of relevant respondents, disregarding the flood of annoyed people who aren’t your consumers.

These people & companies treat Twitter like a popularity contest, hoping to build the biggest brand as defined by followers. But the dynamics of value creation in social media are pretty much the same as everywhere else: create your position – what value you have to contribute – and craft its message. Work at finding those people for whom that value and message is relevant, and then work at providing enough relevance to them that they find your offering compelling and engage you meaningfully.

Resorting to the bullhorn to create that trickle of relevance may seem like a shortcut, but it is counterproductive waste. It diminishes the service experience of my fellow cocreator customers, and is the sort of thin that turns people off to entire media.

Nontraditional value exchange, or a plain old good time.

Services come in all shapes. Some you pay for with money, while others you pay for with effort.

The components are universal. A promise is made, enabled, and kept. Both provider and customer have a role in successful production. The service is concurrently produced and consumed. The end result is more intangible than tangible, and the customer often has to look for visible cues as to a successful outcome.

Brainzooming’s Mike Brown asked me to participate in his hosted #BZBowl yesterday – a twitter-enabled live analysis of Super Bowl XLIV ads from a group of seasoned marketing, branding, and social media observers.

Being “more Bud than Bowl” as Mike puts it, I was happy to participate in what was one of the more pleasant service experiences I’ve had in my still brief venture into social media.

Mike’s event – his semi-public service – promised an opportunity to connect with some like-minded people, expand my network, share with them and learn from their perspectives on big-event marketing, branding and social media. Twitter and the Brainzooming site enabled what was a lively and engaging (not to mention exhausting) discussion about the Super Bowl ads as they appeared. Each of us involved produced commentary as we consumed both the ads and each other’s commentary. My takeaways – the value that I received - were unbelievably rich, having met an enormous number of like-minded marketing professionals in a very short period of time and learned from their collective perspective & experience.

Though a nontraditional exchange of value, Brainzooming promised everyone involved an opportunity to reach beyond their existing network in a fun environment and learn from the marketing perspectives of others. With the co-production effort of everyone involved, it was a tremendous success.

Social media-enabled business is making this type of exchange not only more valuable to businesses and individuals that use them, but much more common.

All-Day Service Tweet Log!

Tomorrow, I’m tweeting every service experience I have throughout the day.

Partially to prove a point on just how may services we interact with every day that we pay for, partially because while I try not to take the interactions for granted, I’ve never actually accounted for every one of them in the span of a day.

It’s a work day, so it is only a partial answer on the number of distinct services we interact with on a day-to-day basis. As such, I may have a weekend version as well, depending on the results of this one.

Stay tuned.

Twitter = Ma Bell?

Everyone is talking about twitter.

Probably because everyone is using it, for personal and business purposes. As a way to keep in touch. As a marketing vehicle. As the entire service operation.

Even though twitter has been around since 2006, it is the odds-on favorite to be “the big idea” of 2009.

It is still in its infancy as a business model, but how will twitter do as a public utility?

Utilities have a unique service model. As network-based businesses, they have to manage capacity surges. twitter has already experienced this, and has the outage history to prove it.

They require layers of redundancy built into their operations to resist failure, as twitter found out this week when a DDOS attack brought the site down for several hours.

They need service operability in times of crisis, to the point where they can be considered critical services. twitter has already seen this with the Iranian election, which kept them operating by Presidential decree to help Iranians deprived of any other media outlet beyond planned system outages.

Twitter is developing very strong social bonds with users, primarily through the network value of its other users.

Utilities, though, are often taken for granted once they mature. Will this happen as companies and individuals view twitter as an indispensable part of their lives / business models / marketing plans?

Will customers start to define value in more economic terms, with service features such as “up-time” seen more and more as table stakes than differentiator? Will expectations increase and tolerance for inadequate service levels, quite high today, decrease with ever more demanding customers. Will we complain about twitter the way we do today about the power company, the cable company, the gas company and the water utility?

Twitter will have to survive a lot of challenges to get to face these problems, but I have to wonder if we will someday look at this novel service for interpersonal and business connectivity as an indispensable utility, with the same service expectations we have come to expect from our mobile service provider.

Does a cement maker need social media?

What companies is social networking important to?

It seems more important in a B2C environment than a B2B environment, though I have a feeling that is about to change. Think about how your friendly neighborhood Project Manager could be using a value-chain “social” network to manage workflow, and you can see where this could be headed.

I would argue that social marketing is more important in a services environment than in a products environment.

This owes to the intangible nature of services. Because the end result of a service is the feeling you have after experiencing it, our standards on service quality are difficult to compare across experiences and companies. Customers getting together to describe the service processes they experienced and how they made them feel start to overcome those challenges.

Most service companies that until now have enjoyed the veil of vaguely defined quality are in for a rude awakening.

It also owes to the fact that in the service environment, the customer plays a role in successful service delivery. Effective dialogue between company and customer can improve the customer’s understanding of what role they are supposed to perform, which would ultimately lead to more service success and a greater rate of overall satisfaction.

Beyond these elements, a company’s customer base also matters.

Whole Foods and Ritz-Carlton are world-class service organizations / experience crafters. In the twitter environment, Whole Foods has over one million followers, while Ritz-Carlton, as of last night, had 214.

That seems about right.

Whole Foods has a collective movement aspect to their experience. The company is open to suggestions from the customer base about how to better serve the market. They’re also hopeful that customers will interact with each other to help and educate each other on everything from new recipes to sustainable consumption.

Ritz-Carlton doesn’t have the collective support element to their experience. In fact, theirs is built on a perception of individual attention, care and privilege as a guest of their hotels. It’s an experience that infers some exclusivity – a club like feel amongst those can afford it. (I was going to say that you wouldn’t see the Skull and Bones Society with a public website, but my factchecker proved me wrong)