MetzMash

April 2008: The Month In Social Media

It's that time of month again, and April was a light month in terms of technical development, or de facto product releases, but there were many little iterations on the social web that will likely make a big difference, as the year goes on. Per the usual MetzMash format, each development is addressed in terms of its business value, and the actionable that you can take in response.

(If you can't tell, I'm going to see Rush for the second time on Sunday night, and the accompanying graphic represents the first Rush album I purchased, in 1989, the futuristic masterpiece Farewell To Kings, which is also for sale in the MetzMash Canteen in the sidebar).

1. Twitter monitoring and search tools become highly differentiated and super-freakin' effective

In the last month, Tweetscan, Quotably and Summize have come into their own as top-notch Twitter (micro-blog) monitoring tools, and the size of the platform has grown steadily.

Business Value: Although you could fork out a ton of cash for a robust monitoring solution, you could also garner much of the same data by using these tools.

Actionable: Use the free tools to set up queries for your brand, your top execs (and possibly your competitors); read them in your RSS feeds.

2. Podcast advertising found to be effective, shady study says

Much to the surprise of radio and big media execs, a study published by (big surprise) podcast evangelist brand Podtrac (along with eMarketer and TNS) shows that podcast advertising was highly effective in that they bring "highly unaided ad recall," according to Doug Keith, president of Future Research Consulting (from Mashable).

Business Value: This study (even though its source is a bit questionable) validates a four-year-old theory: podcast ads work for brand recall, but they don't do so hot if you're trying to obtain an impulse purchase.

Actionable: Assess how much of your audio advertising spend is in the podcast space, and see if you can work up any ROI/ROP numbers, or if you can isolate any results to try to determine CPA (cost per action) based on a recent podcast campaign. A recent example would be an engagement by Adagio Tea on the Diggnation podcast.

3.Yahoo "Opens" its network

Although many advertisers and brands greeted this move with measured optimism, Yahoo's vow to "open" its platform has amazing potential for developers to get in front of, potentially, the largest consumer audience ever. (Yes, this is like Facebook times something like 100x, in terms of the number of actual social connections that could plausibly be made on the Yahoo platform.)

For a deeper read, check out Forrester analyst Charlene Li's excellent debrief.

Business Value: This could be the largest open software platform, in terms of users, anywhere. Lots of people, lots of real estate, lots of money to be made.

Actionable: Assess any existing partnerships your company may have with Yahoo or your Yahoo ad spend. Brainstorm the points of convergence between your existing social application infrastructure and your current Yahoo ad/marketing/social media collateral.

4. Facebook green-lights "low-key" Flash integration

Nobody wants Facebook to begin looking like MySpace's Las Vegas flash, but it seems that the platform has made some minor concessions. It's now possible to use Flash on Facebook Pages. Heck, I didn't even realize this until I saw a Guy Kawasaki post about Jessie Stay's Facebook tome, "I'm On Facebook, Now What."

Business Value: You can now build really robust branded content on your Facebook  page.

Actionable: If you currently use the feature for your branded social network assets, explore the possibility of porting over existing Flash-enabled content from other social network platforms.

5.Groundswell continues to release free technographic data

The Groundswell blog continues to give away bits and bobs (thanks, Jesse) from sundry Forrester research studies that include really relevant social technographic data.

Business Value: This is the best data you're going to get on how your customers and prospects use the social web without paying $1k-5k per report for it, period.

Actionable: Make sure everyone on your marketing team reads this blog. Indispensable. Like Rush's Farewell To Kings. People on your team will rock out to this.

6.Ning fully integrates blogs and external websites

Business Value: Branded social networks can now include non-network web properties, tying your web property ever closer together, and making for a fairly coherent brand experience. It's certainly worked for Saturn on Ning, who recently created a robust ImSaturn network on the platform. 

Actionable: Integrate your blogs with your social network, if your brand has one on Ning.

7. Outbrain launches a blog rating widget

Let's face it: passive engagement rules. Only a tiny percentage of people are actually going to leave a comment on your blog. The rest will *maybe* give you a "star rating," if they even have the time to do that. Are you ready to interact with the other 99% (the folks who don't comment)?

Business Value: You can get a better read on (1) whether your readers actually like your brand's blogging and (2) what other posts these people tend to like.

Actionable: Install the widget.

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One more thing on social media: If you're interested in getting a deeper read on the social gaming space, be sure to be on the lookout for the InterPlay Conference on social gaming, coming up in less than three weeks at the Hotel Kabuki, San Francisco, on May 22. It's being put on by Room Full of People and theMIX Agency (disclosure: my firm), and is the first-ever conference on social gaming.

Business Social: Late March 2008

Business Social is a roundup that I write once a month to chronicle actionable developments on the social web for brands. No pranks here, folks.

From my stats, I can tell that these wrap-ups are my most popular posts, and I've learned that the shortest ones do the best, so, without further ado, let's get into the most actionable developments on the social web in March 2008.

Development #1: Non-profit OpenSocial Foundation announced

Business Value: CNET's Caroline McCarthy calls it the "Justice League of social media," but I see the board, which should be formed by late June, as more of a "NATO", going beyond stabilizing the influence of Facebook (not an Open Social partner) on the social web, but acting to keep any one corporate partner (e.g. Google) from dominating the OpenSocial platform.

Actionable: Know which parts of your company's social web collateral are OpenSocial compatible, and what is not. Develop an action plan to get crucial widgets and helper applications ready to be cross-platform. Don't let your entire social web strategy rest in one tiny social network (i.e. Facebook). Diversify.

Development #2: Groundswell Data Tool released

Business Value: Using this tool may be able to save you time in determining which social web tools your current customers and prospects (and employees) prefer to use. This could save you a ton of money in  conventional marketing spend (surveys and focus groups)

Actionable:If you have a demographic profile of your current customer base, use this solid tool to begin to get a read on the types of tools that they might be using, at this point in time. Caveat: Not combining this aggregate data with your own to make some sort of blended assessment is just plain stupid.

Development #3: Eric Goldman Releases Social Media Slides

Business Value: Eric Goldman is a top-notch social web legal blogger. While his blog is not offered as legal advice, he has sharp opinions on cyberlaw and digital intellectual property. Seeing the presentation of a great communicator like Eric can galvanize your team into understanding, and possibly, action.

Actionable: Make a presentation as succinct and visual as Eric's for your team so they know what they social web looks like and feels like, even if they are unfamiliar with it.

Development #4: H&R Block Models A Totally Transparent Social Web Strategy

Business Value: It really is blatant advertising using social web tools, but it's pretty well done. And proves that your company can (maybe) do it too. 

Actionable: Write a debrief of a social media marketing effort from your company's recent past, and see if it was indeed (1) transparent, (2) engaging, (3) human and (4) fun. Thanks to Jason Falls at Social Media Explorer for a solid case study of that campaign.

Things to look forward to in April:

1. Rohit Bhargava's awesome new book "Personality Not Included," which is going to turn branding on its head.
2. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff's new book, "Groundswell", which is basically the Funkadelic of social web books. This book is going to free a lot of minds, and a lot of asses are going to follow.
3. Enterprise RSS Day of Action - Enterprise RSS usage has gone way up in the last year, and this April 21, a whole bunch of awesome enterprise RSS innovators  have banded together to celebrate the progress and future of enterprise RSS.

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.

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.

January 2008: The Month In Business Social

January has been an exciting month; I finished the first version of There Is No Secret Sauce, a tactical guide to social media, and I also had a really nice redwood fence constructed in my backyard. It took my wife and I a long time to save up enough money to build the fence, and it's got me thinking a lot about what's been happening lately in social media: a lot of lines and alliances have been drawn, but everything seems to be more interdependent than ever.

When I started writing these strategic guides last month, the idea was to focus in on a series of important developments in the last month, and give actionable strategy upon which brands can make decisions that make things happen in social media. So, here goes.

Development #1: Online Video Traffic Rises Sharply

The 12-week old writer's strike has cost the American entertainment industry somewhere between $300-600M, thus far. And it has sent quite a bit of traffic to online video sites. But no one was expecting new Neilsen study numbers to indicate 100% increases (in the 18-49 age group) to the question: "Have you used a video site yesterday?"

Why It Matters: The use of online video, while still slightly skewed towards males, is also seeing the greatest increases in less affluent and less educated groups of the population. Regular use of online video is also on the increase by women.

Business Value: Video is a critical part of the increasingly visual social media mix, and brands need to examine who their communities of customers are, and whether those communities like to use video; the answer is probably "yes".

Actionable: If your brand has no video strategy, begin to investigate what that strategy might look like. Ask around to figure out what kinds of video content are relevant to your brand - can customers talk with customers using video on your web properties? If not, could that be a place to start?

Development #2: Social News Site Digg Changes Their Algorithm

Why It Matters: Brands that don't have a lot of experience executing in social media may think that it's really easy to get their press releases or stories told using social-news aggregator Digg. While the site is wildly popular during the weekdays (1-1.5M unique visitors, many of whom are regulars), it's no longer going to be all that easy for marketers to "game" it by sending a sudden rush of votes at the site, unless those votes are widely distributed (by IP address, and, probably geographic location)

Business Value: Marketers need to know what role social news sites and aggregators play in their social media strategy, and they need to be transparent in the way that they work with these sites.

Actionable: Make sure that any story submitted by your brand to an aggregator or social news site like Digg bears enough news value or interest to influencers that it will get virtual thumbs-ups based on its own merit.

Development #3: MySpace Stats From 10/07 Come Out


Why It Matters: This social network, if it were a country, would rank, population-wise, somewhere between (#11), Mexico and (#10), Japan, with its 110 million members. Even though social network Facebook's current growth rate (with 60 million active users) is poised to catch up in 2009, it hasn't happened yet. If one of the groups of behaviors that your brand includes in its behavioral targeting include "searching for information about consumer products" or "searching for entertainment," this is a property that can't be ignored. Here are the key stats, from Jeremiah Owyang's excellent web strategy blog:

• 300,000 new people sign up daily
• 1 in 4 Americans are on the site
• 85% are over 18
• 14 Billion total comments on the site, 20 Billion total mail messages
• 50 Million mails sent per day on this site - more than A-list mail services Yahoo, Hotmail or Google
• More than 8 million bands and artists on MySpace Music
  

Business Value: Marketers and brands need to understand that, give or take a little bit, 25% or more of their current or prospective customers spend time in this highly conversational social network every month.

Actionable: If your brand doesn't yet have a MySpace strategy, download There Is No Secret Sauce and begin to devise one.

Development #4: Google, Facebook and Plaxo join Data Portability, an open standards group that will allow people to move data from one system to another.


Why It Matters: Data Portability is the standard by which a lot of social networks are going to move closer together in 2008 and 2009. It will likely allow applications to migrate in between networks, and, eventually, allow users to migrate their data between networks.

Business Value: It came as somewhat of an unexpected surprise when Facebook joined the group, as Google's OpenSocial initiative's initial aim was to "out open" Facebook. Data Portability may be of high value to consumers, and as you design applications or social media initiatives, going forward, keep it in your field of vision.

Actionable: Make quarterly check-ins on Data Portability's wikipedia page to stay abreast of what companies and languages are involved.

December 2007: The Month In Business Social

One of my favorite strategy bloggers, Jeremiah Owyang, has been writing some excellent digest posts lately, and it's got me thinking. Some marketing managers simply lack the time to read weekly updates, so I'm going to package developments that impact the B2B and B2C social graph in a monthly roundup format.

Every day, while I commute, I read my feeds on my trusty iPhone, and jot down notes on my notepad. I'm gunning to figure out which ones will likely have a big impact for marketing managers and CMOs over the course of the next year. These roundups are going to come out once a month, generally near the end of the month.

Development #1: Advertising agency McKinney, eschewing the conventional corporate holiday card mailing, "incarerates" 24-year-old production coordinator Ben  Eckerson in a snowglobe. (12/13)

Why It Matters: The snowglobe was one of the most innovative B2B viral marketing campaigns ever. In addition to creating a solid social media-optimized campaign (live video feed, Facebook page, MySpace page, blog, social bookmark links, online store) McKinney leveraged the opportunity to create an HR bonanza, linking to "Jobs At McKinney" on every page. In its third day, CBS' Early Show picked up on the story.

Business Value: By using a lot of creativity and an even measure of social media to optimize a seemingly mundane corporate communications platform, the holiday card, McKinney made national news, dozens of blogs, and likely netted a few really creative young hires. I'll check in with them in 60 days to see if that part worked.

Actionable: In addition to reviewing the environmental impact of your company's holiday communications platform, brainstorm about how this social initiative can be more social media-ready. Could the spring company picnic invite be an internal viral video instead of 500 flyers in peoples' mailboxes?

Development #2: Worklight releases a secure Facebook application, Workbook. (12/18)

Why It Matters: It's one of the first Facebook SAAS (software-as-a-service) offerings, and for $10 per person (less volume discounts), it's probably the priciest Facebook application. It ties in the the Worklight 2.0 platform that's being used by Global 500 companies to the Facebook social networking platform.   

Business Value: Although many enterprise businesses see social networking as a time-sink and incompatible with their corporate culture, a growing number are beginning to see the light, no pun intended.  ZDNet's Dan Farber has the scoop on most of the features, and most of it looks like a cross between Spigit and a really hip-looking intranet. The key difference: many younger employees are already very comfortable working in the Facebook platform.

Actionable: Find out just how many of your employees are on Facebook. A departmental sample will do. Find out how many of them would be willing to use a secure intranet-linked application in Facebook, if they were certain that it would not use their personal information. You could also prepare a brief presentation on enterprise applications that live outside the firewall in social networks (Worklight) or prepare a discussion on whether the Google-led Open Social initiative will be compatible with enterprise networks.

Development #3: IBM launches a maven detector with the Lotus Notes application, called IBM Atlas. (12/18)

Why It Matters: Lotus Notes has one of the largest installed user bases of any integrated desktop client, and was the first already-installed enterprise app to integrate wikis, blogs and RSS. The bad news is that the platform has steadily been losing market share to Microsoft for the last four years.

Business Value: Companies can find out who the key expert is on a given topic (whether it's the CEO or the janitor) using an already-installed platform.

Actionable: Find out who within your company (if your company uses Lotus Notes) makes the collaboration decisions. Find out what they know about the informal network or the Valdis Krebs. If it's relevant, write a proposal that your brand evaluate Atlas. This recent article by Elizabeth Bennett could also be helpful background material. [Thanks to Paul Gillin for the last one!]

Development #4: Pligg prepares the launch of Fraxi, a product that allows people to set up quick Digg-like social news aggregators, much like Ning allows users to set up social networks in minutes. (12/19)

Business Value: Brands that aren't very tech-savvy will be able to set up vertical specific news-sites and enable community interaction, without overhauling their entire website.

Actionable: Talk to your team about how current conversational portals are doing on your site, in terms of engagement, and see if installing something like Fraxi could increase that level of engagement.

Development #5: Pew releases a Teens and Social Media study, updating their 2005 teen content creators study and releasing technographics data that will have a big impact.  (12/27)

Why It Matters: Nearly 2/3 of all online teens in 2007 engage in content creation, and that number is up from 57% in 2004. The study also highlights some key gender differences (girls are 14% more likely to blog than boys, and also 14% more likely to post online photos)

Business Value: While this news is not exactly earth-shattering, given the proliferation of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and related content platforms, seeing the numbers behind the hunches makes tactical decisions easier for marketers.

Actionable: Tailor marketing programs that touch teen stakeholders to be in line with this technographic data.

Development #6: A huge uptick in the usage and amount of municipal social networks in medium-sized cities like Philadelphia and Albuquerque.

Why It Matters: As newspapers continue to fold and media continues a trend towards consolidation, small social networks are stepping in to fill the gap. The people who go to these networks are not "eyeballs." They are people engaging in conversation.

Business Value: These are highly visible conversations about and within a highly segmented local market. These social networks are a marketer's paradise, because the audience is highly engaged.

Actionable: If you work for a Convention and Visitors Bureau, make a case to start a social network, now. If you work for a newspaper, find out what steps your publication (or corporate parent) has taken to allow social collaboration and conversations on your web property. Because if it isn't happening on your site, it's happening somewhere else.

Thanks for taking the time to wade through the whole list. Please leave me comments if you think there were any big hits from December that I may have missed.