Evolving Web

Our Social Infrastructure

Business is being done on Social Media every day.  Lots of it.  Companies are entirely founded on leveraging the power of social media for sales, marketing, and research.

Today a mini ripple went through the community when Techcrunch speculated about Facebook’s financial Health.  Venture Beat slowed this speculation somewhat.

Underneath this is a very real fear.  Sites like Twitter have no visible means of support.  How long can they continue to be a backbone of information and conversation?  What happens to the businesses that have been built on these platforms?

The common argument is that someone else will come along and build something else, if services disappear.  This is akin to the “technological fix” argument for the environment.  If we pollute too much, we’ll create a new tech to fix it.

Maybe it’s a better argument here, but is it a sound one?

Technorati Tags: facebook,twitter,techcrunch,venturebeat,social media,infrastructure,sustainability

We Discuss What’s Important to Us

What is important to us?  Love, Family, Happiness, Food, Sex, Entertainment.  The order of importance may change from moment to moment, but these things make us human.  They make life worth living.  This is important.  We discuss our successes and failures with them, our elation and our pain.

Today Allen Stern let me know that Comscore released a study from August 2008, showing that 41% of people using the net in the UK actively read blogs.

Number three of popularity were food blogs, with 637,000 unique visitors.  (That’s unique visitors and not total page views). Now, mind you that the top 10 blog categories also include Community – Teens and Community – Women where food is likely also discussed. (As well as all those other things in my list).

Also note, this is just blogs. Review sites, Facebook, Twitter and other online discussion sites / tools aren’t included. This 41%, these 637,000 unique Britons, are the tip of the iceberg.  People are discussing and reading each other’s passions on the net every minute of every day.

What have you done to make people passionate about your business?

Technorati Tags: comscore, center networkds, Allen Stern, blogs, blogging, social media, restaurants, food, love

An event or object of awesome social value.

Social Media is social.

Games, contests and fun are also social.  In the social media world, they are commonplace.  They serve as a means of harmless communication, ways to network, and ways to collect valuable information.

So part of your social capital is how you respond to games, contests and fun.  For example, This week Web Ink Now has an interesting little contest.

They want to know what people’s definition of cool is. 

In order to enter the contest, you need to define “cool” in your blog or web site and link back to The Cool Factor context post.

And give your personal definition.

Mine is:  Cool: An event or object of awesome social value.

What does this do?  Well, several things.

1. Gets people talking about David Scott’s blog
2. Gives a fun little creative puzzle to solve
3. Gets a bunch of Google juice by making people link back to the blog and the page.
4. Raises awareness for the book “The Cool Factor”
5. Sends information out through the social media sphere.

So number 5 is important. I learned about this through a tweet on twitter.

Look at the buzz!  There is no shortage of people posting about it.

Good job on the viral marketing, David.  It is certainly an event or object or event of awesome social value (cool).

Technorati Tags: The Cool Factor,Web Ink Now,David Scott,Social Media,Viral marketing

It’s a Popularity Contest

There is no shortage of silly applications to help you feel better about yourself on Twitter.  My favorite is Twitter Grader. It shores up my ego by telling me that I’m one hell of a Twitter user.

Only 3.3% of them are better than me. 

Now, this popularity has yet to get me discounts on car insurance or a new jet.  But it has gotten me a lot of advice and contacts in cities where I knew no one before.

Twitter grader has the easiest UI on earth.  You type in a user name and it calculates a score based on the number of people in your network, your subscriber balance, your tweeting history and some other things.

Another is Twinfluence, a very similar engine, but different UI. 

The overall grading is based on a combination of what they call Velocity, Social Capital, Reach, and Centralization. 

Reach is your followers plus your second order followers, Velocity is the number speed of new followers (first and second order) attracted to your network,  Social Capital measures how popular the people who follow you are, and Centralization is how dependent your network is on some very popular followers.

So it’s a nice little mathematic exercise. And I really appreciate the deep look they give us into the secret sauce. 

These types of tools are so punishing on the Twitter API that it’s hard to get some of them to work.  I really wanted to see TweetWheel in action, but It just was not happening.  It would get caught up in traffic every time.  I never have seen a successful running of it.

People are already discussing how to game / optimize your scores.  Gotta love it.  Geek infrastructure breeds geek toys for geeks to game.

Technorati Tags: twitter,twinfluence,twitter grader,social media

The TouchBase Blog

Just a note that I’ve published a few posts on the TouchBase microsharing blog.

Both posts are about using Twitter as a tool for market research.  The second one shows how bacon wins handily over religion every time.

Would You Like that With a Bacon Twist?

and

Twitter is a Sea of Market Research

Also, on the Modus Cooperandi Blog I’ve written two posts about worries that small businesses have about social media.

They start with the post “Your Voice is Your Brand.” 

Technorati Tags: Twitter,pistachio,touchbase,microsharing,microblogging,bacon

Capture or Befriend

Social media is social. In order to be social, you need to go where people are.  Where the party is, so to speak.

When I talk to businesses about social media, they want to set up their own sites.  They want to throw their own party.

Parties are a lot of work and you have to clean up after them.  People think that if they throw their own party, they will capture all the attention and people will love them. But the truth is, the focus becomes the quality of the party and not your message.

It makes a lot more sense to go to an existing party and meet people.  Circulate and after a time find a crowd that wants to speak with you.  That you resonate with.  Your message is what comes out.

It’s much better to befriend than to capture.

Jeremiah Owyang has a nice post from over the weekend about this.  He calls it “Fishing Where The Fish Are.”

Technorati Tags: Jeremiah Owyang, social media

Did Something Just Happen?

Understanding is important.  Nancy White talks about this today in her excellent post “Reflections of a Journey”.  She was working with a diverse group of people on a project for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the UN.  Her group needed to communicate, form solutions, agree to the solutions, and then agree to the final meaning of those solutions.

While Nancy’s experience may have highlighted issues in the need for understanding due to her highly culturally diverse group, this is vital for small groups and business every day.  Even without any apparent cultural diversity.

We should never assume when we leave a meeting that anyone really shares the same idea of what happened.

This is where the intersection of social media and business truly lies. Taking the tools we’ve created for diverse and dispersed groups and focusing them on smaller groups with definite agendas, we can increase organizational understanding.

In business applications using the lessons of social media will include:

• Save the context of decisions that are made (pervasive debrief)
• Facilitate the making of decisions
• Allow people to have a voice who are not present
• Save the artifacts of business (memos, reports, etc) in a searchable space
• Allow people to have and share contacts within and outside of the organization
• Allow the communication of current status for all individuals
• Allow the rapid retrieval, use, alteration and replacement of information
• Allow collaborative development
• Allow rapid views into where a given deliverable is in process
• Allow rapid understanding of what tasks are blocked and why

Without the clarity that comes with a open in-office communication, people are always subjected to “The F.U.D.” (Fear, uncertainty and doubt).  This creates organizational waste because all decisions need to be strained through a FUD filter.  This filter is made irrelevant with open communication.   

In short, open and immediate communication will provide the baseline for understanding.  From there, people can act and make decisions.  They can be free.

Technorati Tags: Nancy white,social media,CGIAR,focused social media

Spam Arrives on Facebook Chat

  One of my friends in Singapore's Facebook account has apparently been hijacked by spammers.  Every day at 11 am her account now sends me spam via Facebook chat.  Since it's 4 am in Singapore, I can't believe that every night she climbs out of bed to tell me about Macy's gift certificates.

I tried to reach Facebook about this, but they weren't interested.

Has anyone else seen this?

Technorati Tags: facebook, spam, social media, social networking

Forced Feeding

To all my social media readers, I'd love to know what you think of this.  Many studies have shown that people expect businesses to be on social media, including twitter.  They don't just want it, they expect it.

Here we have a tweet from Popeye's Chicken.  The tweets from Popeye's tend to be fairly silly, folksy humor.  They often announce things going on with Popeye's. 

Here we have a silly one during the presidential debates. 

What I'm curious about is the "#debate08" hash tag.  It is used here complete legitimately.  But otherwise, @popeyeschicken is read by people who opt in and follow the business.  Here, @popeyeschicken is using a hash tag to insert itself into a conversation.

(A hash tag allows people to follow public communication on twitter that identifies itself thematically.  So in this case #debate08 can be searched and all tweets about the debate can be read.)

So I'd like to know what my readers think of this as a precedent.  Now advertising can be (funny or not) inserted into ongoing conversation.  I'm not saying this is good or bad.  I just want to know what others think.

Technorati Tags: Twitter,social media,popeye's chicken

Social Media Focus for Small Business

Small business owners are busy.  We're just busy.  Many times we are the CEO, CFO, CIO, CTO and everything else all rolled into one dedicated, passionate and utterly overworked person.  The last thing we need is something else to do.

At first blush, Social media seems to be another "thing to do" and therefore an unwelcome addition to an already overloaded task list.

But Social Media is a very helpful tool.  It can help us market, improve our operations, build loyal customers, attract new sales, and better collaborate with our peers.  Often it can do these things simultaneously.

Company Improvement - Sites with reviews like Yelp or Urban Spoon may have direct reviews of your business.  Other sites like Twitter may be holding direct mentions of your company.  These tools may also have significant market data you can mine.  This information can give you vital direct or indirect information for improvement of your company.  And it's free.

Professional Relationships - Businesses benefit from timely information.  Traditionally this has been obtained through publications or association meetings.  These happen periodically and with significant cost.  There is also a limit to the information that you can get.  With social media, social networks made of up your peers in your field or with business resources in general can give you a great deal of information in one place and when you need it.

If you need to know how a new regulation can impact your business, an active on-line social network on LinkedIn or Facebook can give you vital time-sensitive professional information with very little effort on your part.

Reputation Management - Those review sites mentioned above, blogs, and other types of social media  can send customers to you -- but they can also pan you.  Following the discussion of your business on-line is now an inseparable part of responsible business ownership.  Your brand image is directly impacted by what is discussed on-line.

Community Building - Your customers, believe it or not, are as passionate about your business as you are.  That energy is money.  Savvy business owners will use social media for the care and feeding of their customer community.  Such actions will result in more loyal customers, better reviews, and revisions of negative reviews.

This Post is an overview of social media and why small businesses should not ignore it - even if the small business owner feels that there isn't time to devote to it.  In upcoming posts, I'll discuss specific types of tools and how to fold those into daily operations.

Technorati Tags: small business,restaurants,social media,social media business,social media management