MetzMash

Mobile post sent by adammetz using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

Conference Report:Business Applications for Social Networking

Since Adam was busy attending the SNAP summit in San Francisco, I was lucky enough to take his place at a conference about Business Applications of Social Networking hosted by the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives this week. (Thanks, Adam!)

As an eager-to-learn Social Media novice,  the half-day event proved worthwhile. It was a wonderful introduction to Social Media, but it was also inspiring to see so many professional women of all ages come together to talk about cutting-edge web strategy. Of course, there were also some pretty inspiring men in attendance.

One such fellow, President & founder of Socialtext, Ross Mayfield, kicked things off with a stellar introduction to the world of social media, and how businesses can leverage social software to their advantage. You can check out the detailed slides on his blog.

Prolific blogger and Forrester senior analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, outlined the basics of Social Media implementation with astonishing clarity during his presentation. Do yourself a favor and check out these slides. This man is amazing -- and Forrester's POST methodology should be included in Communications textbooks nationwide. 

Next up, was a panel on “The Strategic and Tactical Implementation of Social Networks in Business”.  All the women were smart and savvy, but Karen Appleton from Box.net struck me as rather harsh in her assessment of Facebook profiles when she made it seem like a young professionals were committing a mortal sin by donning a cocktail dresses in their pictures.

Robin Wolaner gave a humorous presentation on Purposeful Networking, particularly as it pertain to Baby Boomers and her newly launched Boomer-oriented site, TeeBeeDee .

Finally, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini pulled it all together in her presentation on “Launching and Growing Your Online Community”. This woman is classy and cool, and her comparison of launching a Social Networks to throwing a party made me want to start one on her site.

All in all, whether you are a man or a women, this conference was a great introduction to Social Media Tactics for Business. You should be able to see the whole thing online on the FWE&E website next week.

Until then, here are my basic takeaways:

•    Understand your audience and prototype your network before launch

•    The NetGens are coming of age, and you bet they will expect/bring more internal Social Media applications to the workplace

•    Plan to be flexible. Your customers will ask for change. Heed their advice, but don’t lose your voice in the process

•    Don’t don something in your Facebook photo you wouldn’t wear to the office

•    If you have a corporate blog, make sure it’s transparent

•    Social Networking isn’t for everyone (yet). If it doesn’t make sense for your business needs, don’t push it.

Social Application Best Practices Study: Loladex

I don't typically look at discrete social network applications from an end-user point of view, but after watching Joshua Porter's excellent presentation on social application design yesterday at the SNAP 2.0 Summit, I feel compelled to illustrate some best practices (and not so great ones too).

When I found out that AOL veteran Laurence Hooper was coming out with Loladex, I decided to check it out. (How many ex-AOLers are involved in some new type of vertical search?!) Loladex strives to one-up Yelp, within social network application platforms (e.g. Facebook), offering local search and socialized recommendations for restaurants, nightclubs, veterinarians and other consumer services.

So, here's what they're doing right (best practices):

• They're blogging from the get-go. And tweeting. That helps. As long as they keep it up.
• The application tells people where they rank within all Loladex raters; this sense of friendly competition encourages application use.
• Staying local; they're striving to achieve kick-ass competency in their local market (Washington D.C.) before trying to take over the rest of the nation. If other social network platform apps tried to geo-target their user base, they might have better luck achieving sustainable early membership.
• Variable trust feature: apps that leverage the social graph don't always account for varying levels of trust. Let's face it: you don't value all of your friends' opinions equally, right?
• Solid map mash-ups and Netflix-style solicitations (e.g. "Do you know a good storage company?") to encourage users to contribute content.

Here's what they need to work on:

• Blogging with a generic Wordpress template? C'mon, guys. Take an extra hour to customize a CSS stylesheet.
• Viral coefficient: How do they expect this application to become viral? Aside from asking people to invite their friends in order to improve results, they need to find another way to leverage the content to encourage sharing. If they're not accounting for attrition and there's no virality plan here, the app won't be sustainable.
  
• Opentable reviews: Why? No one goes to that property for reviews. I barely even go there for dinner reservations.
• Personal value does not yet precede network value: The current library of content will not draw users to the site for a few more weeks, unless  they live in the D.C. area; possibly it would have been better to wait a few months before doing national outreach. Why not, instead brief every social media writer/blogger within 50 miles of Washington D.C.?

-----------
Coming tomorrow: My wrap-up of actionable news from the SNAP 2.0 Summit and my colleague Tessa Greenwood's notes on the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs & Executives Social Networking conference.

The Best "Free" Tagging Solution We've got

First off, no strategic tagging or folksonomy solution is free; they all take a ton of time to get information in and out of. There's also a huge learning curve and opportunity cost for most teams,

And normally, I'd try to jump quickly to review the new release of a social media product that I use and strategically recommend. But now that I've been using Diigo for nearly a year, I feel a lack of impetus to rush, because I'd rather take the time to learn to use and balance the features.

Don't get me wrong; there are tons of multifunctional social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, Sphere, Magnolia, etc.) that you can employ in a strategic manner. But Diigo's the best of them. Just so you know, it's a double-edged sword, at that. And I'll leave it to other bloggers to give blow-by-blow feature breakdowns. I just want to explain the strategic importance of the tool.

I've been a Diigo user for nearly a year now, and I likely have deployed one of the largest strategic implementations of Diigo (my company uses it as a targeting solution, sharing it with over 30 people and some clients.)

In the wake of Diigo, a slew of imitators have popped up: Clipmarks and Blogrovr both have tried to steal Diigo's thunder, coming out with pared-down versions of some of Diigo's best features. But , I'd rather say that for small-to-medium sized organizations who need some type of strategic tagging, you should go with Diigo.

Let's get its flaws out of the way: the biggest obstacle is convoluted user interface and simply too many options. Some days I'm unsure whether Diigo is a research tool, a tagging solution, a slideshow software, or a social network. Imagine what would happen if 37Signals responded to every single feature request in their forums. Sure, they'd make a lot of customers happy. But they'd also convince a lot of prospective customers that they were batshit insane.

So, let's try and look past this attitude, and gage this software product by its strengths: the first of their pros would include fast, responsive support via email. The second would include secure RSS feeds. When you're deploying a strategic tagging solution (for PR or marketing purposes, or even for, say, sales targeting), there are two things that you need: (1) quick support, should something not work and (2) total privacy on all data.

Diigo has pretty good privacy options; once you're logged in and using the Diigo Toolbar (where it seems to work well in most browsers, even on a Mac), it's fairly easy to share the bookmarks and comments only with folks within your company, or even with a group that's composed of your company and its clients (that's one way I've been using it for months). The Webslides feature is also pretty cool, if you're working with data that's public (a la Slideshare), but if you're only using it inside your company, it's pretty rough, because all of the slideshows and URL lists are publicly visible.

Although Diigo's social networking features have also evolved to even surpass those of del.icio.us, this is not exactly advantageous, if you're using Diigo in a strategic manner. The key takeaways for training your team to use Diigo are as follows:

1. Make sure everyone understands that the purpose of strategically tagging data is to search it later for a purpose (i.e. building media lists, conducting outreach, making sales calls, etc.) If the organization lacks an impetus to retrieve the data, tagging it is pointless.
2. Reserve one tag as a "red-flag" tag for time-sensitive, company-wide data. Make everyone subscribe to an RSS feed for this tag (e.g. "red," "hot" or similar), and instruct your team that it will replace all-company emails of important information.
3. Mailing lists of URLs should become a thing of the past once Diigo is installed; teach your team the value of tagging, both as a time-saver and as an ontological device.
4. Teach your team to take advantage of Diigo's little-known tag-clustering "Related Tags" capabilities. On the right-hand side of the screen, below the tag that you've selected, lies a slew of loosely related tags. These can aid your team in tough searches; tell them to run the stubborn terms through Diigo to see if they can come up with alternatives.
5. The most critical thing to have in any strategic technology solution is full buy-in and use by your company's management team. Their example speaks volumes, in showing others the business value of the technology.

89% of Your Customers Don't Blog

Far be it from me to be a pessimist; I think I'm more of a glass-half full kind of strategist, or at least that I have idealist/humanist leanings. That said, I can say that after checking out Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li's Harnessing The Power of Social Applications from the Sloan Review, that I need to give some of my readers a swift reality check. I'm in the midst of writing a social media strategy for four fairly well-known consumer packaged goods brand, and while I don't want to scare the shit out of them, I want them to leave my workshop equipped with solid tools, solid strategy and a realistic mindframe to execute from.

So, based on the aggregation of the Forrester studies from 2007, based on the United States, here are the key take-aways that I have, about our social media use, on average:

• 75% of your customers don't read blogs
• 89% of your customers don't write a blog, either
• 71% of your customers don't watch user-generated content
• 75% of your customers don't visit social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Facebook)
• 82% of your customers don't participate in discussion forums
• 75% of your customers don't read online ratings or reviews
• 89% of your customers don't post online ratings or reviews
• 92% of your customers don't use RSS

 

These percentages are based on a metric of one-monthly usage. Keep in mind that these are broad-stroke averages, and I'm not attempting to belittle the importance of social media here. I'm just trying to set a realistic baseline, so that my clients and readers know who they're trying to engage with, when working with social media tools. So, for example, I'm working with a tea company that has about 500,000 unique customers in any given year, they can assume that the amount of current/prospective customers they'll be engaging with, in social media, will be about 100,000, give or take a bit.

And that's still a shitload of people. Better take 'em seriously.

I'll be at the Social Network Applications Platform Summit 2.0 tomorrow as well; if you'd like to record a podcast for Metzmash or LaunchSquad's Exclamation blog, come up and talk to me.

What The Facebook Changes Mean For Your Brand

As many of us read in the Silicon Valley Insider yesterday, Facebook is about to pass MySpace in terms of global traffic. This morning, Facebook unveiled a series of new features that enable a more split-personality type experience, allowing users to separate their work lives from their personal lives. This development was likely nine to twelve months in the making.

The key development was a selective privacy feature that trumps just about every other social network, especially MySpace and LinkedIn. Here's a few use cases:

• A college student is about to begin seeking employment; she changes all of her college party photos to only be viewable by a small group of close friends
• A startup company realizes that their CEO is posting some not-so-inspired content on Facebook; they ask him to "shrink" his circle of influence

The iconic Facebook privacy lock will likely inspire imitation by other social networks, and we can expect them to follow suit in a matter of months. There are two implications for brands, from a social media perspective:

Human Resources: Doing stealth background checks on Facebook (and, soon, the other social networks) just got a lot harder. Unless the candidate's a total moron.

Marketing: Targeting just got amazingly better, within social networks, if you have customer evangelists in these channels. The down side of this is that you won't be privy to seeing a lot of information, since people will only be sharing it privately, with their select groups of friends. A typical use case of this would be a record label doing a customer evangelist (street team) marketing campaign.
They may grant their street team exclusive rights to share tracks from an upcoming album within a social network (and users who previously would not have shared content will now participate), but they will have to rely upon this street team for reporting data, whereas it may have been publicly assessable before.

Yahoo Buzz: Bigger Than Digg In A Week? Geez

Normally, I'd pooh-pooh any service that claims to be bigger than Digg after only a couple weeks of use, but that appears to be the deal with Yahoo Buzz. And it's such a bummer to me, too, because I finally got the chance to chat a bit with Kevin Rose at the Digg Party at SXSW last week. Just when I feel like the big Digger himself is listening to my suggestions (live bands on Diggnation, live shows from Vancouver, etc.), I feel like Yahoo's trying to pull the rug out from under him, with none of Digg's culture or sense of humor.

A lot of people have heard of a Diggstorm -  when a torrent of traffic is suddenly unleashed upon a site due to its inclusion on Digg - and a Buzzstorm, the effects of Yahoo's 200-400M+ users landing on a single site with little advance warning, seems to have devastating effects as well. For a little perspective,  check out the graphic above (courtesy of Compete). On a given day, it's possible that a Buzzstorm could be 5-6x as strong as a Diggstorm, not accounting for day-to-day variances.

Yahoo's Buzz algorithm seems to be a bit more varied in its sources than Digg's, and it includes:

• User votes
• Search result tallies
• Number of times a story is emailed out from Buzz
• Some other weird hocus-pocus that will doubtlessly be debated ad nauseum in the blogosphere

Don't get me wrong, I plan on checking out the Buzz, to periodically assess it's value, but if you see me walking down the street looking into my iPhone, I'm on Digg, where people know me better as DryCleaningRulz.

Social Media FAQ: FriendFeed

This is the first in an ongoing series of FAQ's (lists of frequently asked questions) about various social media tools and strategies.

What It Does: FriendFeed aggregates all of your status-update services in one place (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, flickr, etc.) as well as RSS content (your blog, Google Reader) and some retail sites (Amazon), and can be embedded as a module in some homepages like iGoogle.
 

Background: FriendFeed came on the scene about six months ago. The Mountain View-based company was founded by ex-Googlers from the Google Maps, Adsense, GMail and Google Groups teams.

 

Why You May Want To Use It: To save time.  Checking FriendFeed is faster than checking LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and 15 other services. It also recommends "friends," people who are usually one degree away from your network, who you may know.

Why You May Not Want To Use It: You may not have all that many friends who take advantage of all of the service's links.

Usage: According to Compete, FriendFeed's usage appears to be in the 50K monthly unique range. For points of comparison, Google-owned Jaiku has similar on-web traffic (excluding mobile and client devices). Twitter is headed up to the 700k monthly unique range here, so FriendFeed's on-web traffic is about 1/14 as strong as Twitter.

Business Value: If you spend a ton of time monitoring micro-blog and social network platforms, FriendFeed could be a timesaver, especially if you'd like to monitor, say, all of the social network and microblog properties of all of the people who work on your executive team. But they'd all have to sign up for FriendFeed to make this possible. Keep an eye on this one, but not totally essential at this point, due to lack of critical mass. Growth is also not even on par with Twitter's early days, yet.

InsideView Helps Salesforce and SugarCRM push the Envelope with Social Media

Disclosure: InsideView is a LaunchSquad client, and I work for LaunchSquad

When I hear about terms like Sales 2.0 and Marketing 2.0, I'm always a little skeptical. Obviously, the umbrella term Enterprise 2.0 (or Enterprise social software) doesn't cover a lot of small and medium businesses and most of what I've seen in this space is intranet-focused, aiming at developing internal company initiatives and culture. It seems to me that a lot of the sales and marketing divisions of medium and large companies were practically skipped over by the social media boom. At best, social media in organizations of this size is thought of as a marketing tool, but not a modus operandi for sales. I mean, c'mon: poking someone on Facebook to deliver a pitch doesn't count as "social media".

InsideView's seeking to change all that. Their new product, SalesView is an on-demand application that will be useful to enterprise and SMB sales and marketing folks alike. I doubt this was modeled after 37Signals pricing (always offering some tier of the product for free), but it's pretty darn cool that there's a semi-functional free version of the tool available.

"By offering SalesView in a freemium model, we are enabling all sales and marketing organizations to take advantage of our unique offering," said Rand Schulman, InsideView's CMO.

That makes sense to me.The product comes as a CRM mash-up, and works in the SugarCRM or Salesforce environment.

Here's how it works: SalesView aggregates meaningful social graph data composed of the salesperson (and target's) social graph information as well as further "soft information," and combines it with all of the typical "hard facts" that have been previously delivered by sales software (mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, expansions, etc.)

InsideView has been really into this term, Socialprise, a portmanteau of "social" and "enterprise". When it all comes down it, busy sales professionals are crying for a way to integrate their social media lives (Facebook, Plaxo, et al) with their sales lives. There's a pretty rad whitepaper on this on the InsideView website. They're billing it as the "natural convergence" of enterprise apps and the CRM stew. This really makes me wonder if all of the non-SaaS CRM brands are going to strive to become InsideView partners. (Do you hear me, Sage?)

The customer list is pretty legit, too: Symantec, Webex and Ariba are among them. If you'd like to take SalesView for a spin, check out the InsideView site.

Business Social: Everything Big From Early Feb. To Mid-March

This is an ongoing series of posts in which I advise companies on how to modify their social media strategy based on emergent developments in the social media space. Normally, I put these out at the end of the month, but I've been slammed with client work at LaunchSquad (and band rehearsals, honestly).

My week-long trip to Austin (for SXSWi) certainly didn't speed things up. So, here's my monthly roundup of developments that have impacted the business social graph, and social media, as it pertains to brands.

Here we go, in no particular order...

Development #1: YouTube Expands API (application programming interface)

Business Value: The big deal about this announcement is that it allows sites to interact with YouTube remotely. Users can now:

• Upload video or video responses to YouTube from brand websites
• Customize video player UI (buttons, look and feel) using software
• Add and change video metadata (ratings, titles, descriptions)

One example of a brand instantly taking action on this is video-creation site Animoto's direct-upload feature for their professional-looking video content.

Actionable: Figure out the channels within your web property or community that are missing video. Add video where necessary. Use the new YouTube API features if you deem them a fit, especially if you're doing anything with consumer-generated (or rated) video.

Development #2: People Continue Revolting During Conferences When The Session or Panel Sucks

Business Value: If you're on panel and it sucks, the audience will likely be Twittering or chatting behind your back. If you don't deliver the value that the panel or session promised, they may simply organize via backchannels and either railroad or terminate your session. Read this chat transcript from the Social Marketing Strategies Metrics panel from SXSW to see what this looks like.

Actionable: If you're putting on a conference, make sure that panel or session descriptions match up with the information being presented. Assume that the audience will be chatting in real-time during any and all sessions. Encourage them to chat, and possibly monitor it from the panel, so you'll at least know when the audience is displeased.

Development #3: MarketWire Debuts An Affordable, Full-Featured Social Media Release

Business Value: For only a little more than the price of a press release with conventional distribution, MarketWire has finally debuted a rich-media social media release that easily holds video and audio and maintains real-time tracking of your company's news, as it happens. It also allows for comments (almost) on the release itself.

Actionable: Talk to your PR firm and ensure that they understand what this development means, and when it's appropriate to use the SMR, and when it's a waste of money.

Development #4: MySpace Debuts MySpace Applications

Business Value: One year later, MySpace catches up with Facebook's robust application deployment. Even though they may not be the first mover here, MySpace's critical mass (upwards of 111M users) makes this move important.

Actionable: Assess your brand's existing social applications, if you have any. Port the necessary ones over to MySpace, if you decide that your stakeholders "live there."

Development #5: Google's Double-Whammy: Google Analytics Debuts Benchmarking Feature and Google Releases a Social Graph API

Business Value: If you currently make social applications or plan on making them, you'll need to follow all news on Google's Social Graph API. This application programming interface allows users to denote whether things that they're linking to (blogs, microblogs, video content) belong to their friends or to themselves (e.g. "Hey, that's mine.") across social web platforms. The key win for end-users here is that if, say, Jim has a friend named Jenny on Facebook, and then he joins Yelp, he can easily find his existing Facebook friends on Yelp. Depending on how your brand uses the social web, there can be some huge implications here. The new benchmarking feature allows you to compare your site analytics to other companies in your industry, via anonymous data sharing.

Actionable: Watch the social graph API video on the Google site. Write a internal blog post or memo explaining what this means to your company. Decide whether you'd like to share your company's analytics data with the competition (anonymously), if you use Google Analytics.

Development #6: LinkedIn Implements Facebook-like features To Enable More Social Features on their Network

Business Value: Finally, the business social network (whose traffic is modestly, slowly rising) implements low-key social features to enable status updates. This is *the* way to gently drag older executives who may be uncomfortable with content-creation social media (blogs, microblogs, etc.) to a lighter, more passive engagement. Although some of the new features (news sharing) may mimic features on your company intranet, many, like status updates, may get first time use in LinkedIn from some stakeholders at your company.

Actionable: Figure out how much of your company's traffic comes from LinkedIn. If there's a substantial amount, ensure that all top executives and front-line salespeople have profiles on this network; it's highly visible in search. Write a brief presentation explaining what the features do for each team.

Development #7: AOL Acquires Social Network Bebo 

Business Value: Bebo, a social network well-known for its outages and downtime, was acquired by AOL last week. AOL, better known for utter incompetence in their acquisition of behavioral targeting company Tacoda, hopes to plug the social networking holes in their varied properties and applications by purchasing Bebo. Look for single-login social networking features and functionality across many AOL properties (AOL Video, Weblogs Inc. Blogs, TMZ.com) in future months.

Actionable: Assess your brand's social media activities on the Bebo platform and figure out if this infrastructure can be pushed out across other parts of AOL's content network. Keep a close eye on AOL's properties for social features.

Development #8: Consensus: Social Media and Applications Will Perform Well In A Recession  

Business Value: Forrester social media analyst Josh Bernoff wrote the right post at the right time (and didn't claim to be an economist). The key points were that: (1) we're not in a tech bubble, (2) awareness ads are losing effectiveness (and they're really expensive, (3) social apps are dirt-cheap and (4) we can assess this stuff. Dozens of writers agreed, and LaunchSquad client Eric Schurr at Awareness gives a cool spin on this, from a enterprise social-network perspective.

Actionable: Find out what's going to happen with your brand's ad spend, should things begin to decelerate. Justify the cost-effectiveness of social media to your team. An internal blog post or two should do the trick, for now.

Development #9: Microsoft Lines Up Their Advertising Acquisitions (Rapt, Aquantive) to Fight Google (& Doubleclick)

Disclosure: My spouse works at Rapt.

Business Value: The missing link in Microsoft's advertising chain was an inventory-management component. With their acquisition of Aquantive (mid-2007), they filled in the ad network component, and by purchasing Rapt last week, they brought in the dynamic inventory management piece to complement their Atlas Publisher Suite. SMB publishers (and businesses in general) will now see heated competition from Microsoft against Google.

Actionable: Talk to your advertising department to assess whether these developments will increase your company's advertising revenue, if you publish content. If so, begin a conversation about what role social ads will have here. Monitor your ad platform of choice for social ad developments. A good pulse to watch here would be the continued coverage of Facebook's third-party cookie advertising, which could be the harbinger in this space.

Development #10: The Marketing Of No Marketing Panel @ SXSW 

Business Value: This is the best panel I've heard on community management, ever. The do's and dont's were clearly laid out, for big and small brands. The panel included Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, Hugh MacLeod, Tara Hunt and Deb Schulz. Here's a second perspective on the panel.

Actionable: Sit down and listen to this entire panel. Summarize it and make a brief presentation for your executives. If I can't find a video version of it online today, I'll post my audio version of it by 3pm PST.