Lawrence Coburn wrote some detailed notes when he went to VLAB the other day. You can find them here.
More info on the panelists and the discusion in general can be found here.
Archive for the 'Social Media' Category
Shuzak’s presentation is very interesting.
One slide particularly got me thinking about some of Facebook’s recent moves. In the last couple of weeks Facebook has begun to put the kosh on invites in order to create more thoughful and considered applications and drive the spammers away.
I thought OpenSocial’s achilles heel was this lack of ‘virality’. It’s possible to create generic applications, but OpenSocial cannot take advantage of Facebook’s social graph. It is however scalable. And that’s the irony, because if you build something on Facebook that works through the social graph, it will be impossible (at the moment) to get it working across OpenSocial – All those viral invitations useless…
By pushing back so heavily on the invites, Facebook is helping developers not to think about how to game viral goodness out of the platform, but instead how to build really engaging applications. It also let’s any particularly successful applications that work on OpenSocial to benefit from additional engagement with the social graph rather than being spammed with it.
Despite Facebook’s very clean and well documented platform, the numbers still matter, and although the experience and audience will be more engaging and valuable on Facebook, it’s dwarfed by the 250+ million accessible users available on OpenSocial. I’d hate to be an OpenSocial developer right now though…it looks painful!
Undoubtedly there’ll be experiences created for both platforms, but I doubt very much whether there’ll be one killer branded application that’ll work just as well on either…unless it’s a mobile one…who could forget Tetris 
Tightly knitted online communities are “clusters” and manifestations of social media such as blogs and widgets are “connectors”.
Some people emphasize clusters over connectors; others connectors over clusters…
This was the title of a conference held in San Francisco a couple of days ago which Jeremiah Owyang spoke at. With Social Media and digital WOM marketing, friends will tell friends about their experience with a company, thereby impacting the way in which traditional marketing works.
They handed out this ‘pact’ to all attendees.
Among the many findings during the discussions were the following:
Different ways with Dealing with Detractors
# Varies in every situation.
# 1 to Many communications.
# Make them feel heard.
# Compensate them (depending on severity).
# Create a place for direct feedback, rather than having it in community forums.
# Develop a process for the different types of detractors.
# Having a good tone, being consistent with all members.
General Best Practices
# Trust is the foundation of every community
# Great relationships with members that want to share
# Make sure every question that is asked gets an appropriate answer
# Create a year long plan, so it’s effective across the business, thinking strategic
# Create valuable content
# Recognize valuable contributors
# Have knowledgeable moderators
# Incorporate it into your products
# Being Human: Make sure that people know that the community manager is a real person
# Acknowledge people
# Loyalty programs
# Focus on experience
# Quality Content
# Ask permission: Ask the members if we can reach out and talk to them first
# Start threads with questions to get the conversations going
# Help users connect with other users, identify ‘super users’
# You can never give too much information
# Encouraging feedback from the community
# Always have a direct email so it can encourage rapid response
# Rewarding and recognizing members that have done good work
# Embrace what the community is actually doing
# Acknowledge when people are right –even if they are hostile
# Bubbling up information, turning things into FAQs
# Internal encouragement for employees (points)
# Every question that someone else can answer, have it answered by the right person
# Track Google Alerts, if someone tracks outside the community pull them in.
# Be transparent, let the community monitor and police itself (rather than the company taking too much control)
# Reward and thank users that participate
# Plan and integrate internal knowledge bases
More here
Forums should be like social mixers. Everyone is at equal level, milling about and discussing various topics with others. Forums allow anyone to start a topic and anyone to respond to one. Members are often at equal level, and content is usually segmented by topic. (rather than by people).
Blogs are like a keynote speech where the speaker (blogger) is in control of the discussion, but the comments area allows questions and comments from the audience. Kind of like a Q&A session after said keynote.
Blogs are journals often authored by one individual, and sometimes teams. In the context of business communication, these are often used to highlight exclusive content and talk with the marketplace, joining the conversations that existing external bloggers are having.
Social Networks are like topic tables at a school lunch. Imagine a fresher’s fair with big white signs above big long tables inviting people to sit down and join up with others of a like-minded interest? It’s like that.
Social networks allow people to focus on a person’s relationships or interests, rather that just their focused on topic. People that know each other (or want to meet each other) can connect via a variety of common interests. These are great tools to get people of like interest to connect to each other and share information.
In this way, it’s possible to concentrate on the selling points of each and hopefully bridge people’s expectations when using them.
Back in February 2007 I wrote a post on the launch of the US Presidential candidates and how important digital would be in deciding the outcome of the next president of the United States.
Today, Super Tuesday will bring to an end to what started in February 2006. And it’s astonishing to me what difference digital has made to the experience.
Back then micro-blogging was barely a whisper. Twitter launched at SWMX in March of that year and John Edwards was the first to use it followed in quick succession by the other candidates.
At the time, I was very impressed with Barack’s choice of Brightcove to virally spread his ‘message’ and a little dumbstruck by Hilary’s choice of high quality Quicktime interviews (focusing primarily on news broadcasters and not bloggers picking up her sound bites). One truely seemed to understand the difference between digital and broadcast media whilst the other was pretending at the time that it didn’t matter. How times have changed.
All candidates not only twitter, but Google has teamed with Twitter to provide a Twitter/ Google mashup for Super Tuesday.
The very nature of how the candidates have been monitored has had to change.
Politics has moved on from sound-bites and newspaper spin. Discussion and debate online has fueled the need for openness, transparency and a new dialogue between the next president of the US and its people.
I wish them all a great deal of luck…and I hope brands have been paying attention
How soccerticketsonline.com has generated traffic to its site. A nice case study.
Off the back of that post there’s another Soccer blog illustrating how soft the competition is in this area.
Virgin Airlines have turned some of the most well-known and subscribed to bloggers into cartoon characters for a series of cartoons entitled ‘Virgin Americans’.
Cartoon illustrating the features of flying Virgin Airlines.
Virgin Americans Flickr gallery
A blog review from David Winer.
Another blog review.
BoingBoing review
All 3 are powerful word-of-mouth recommendations.
BoingBoing have signed an exclusive deal to supply Virgin Airlines with their BoingBoing.tv content. Nice fit.
All good stuff and does what it set out to. Domestic air travel in the US is now in a huge fare war as a result.
This has been a really well executed digital PR strategy from Virgin America.
Also similar in strategy is O2 Cocoon’s blog – Very interesting to see where O2 chose to install the blog – within O2 Blueroom and on its own domain – rather than on the o2.co.uk domain. This way I guess they enable the bloggers and guest writers the ability to write opinionated reviews and comments which spark conversation rather than just decimating other news in a bland way. Talk radio DJs are opinionated on purpose in order to get people to pick up the phone, the same is true online.
What will be interesting to see will be the way in which O2 Cocoon’s blog sows ‘seeds of conversation’ that dovetail in with other campaign activity over the coming months. It’s also a little surprising that there’s no Facebook group, sponsored or otherwise, which would drive people to the blog.
Update: O2 now have a Facebook group, either I missed it (very likely given the numbers it’s generated!) or it’s one of the fastest growing groups on Facebook! Love the scoreboard.
MSNBC has bought Newsvine, the citizen journalist site, bringing Social Media to the news channel.
