Archive for the 'Social Networking' Category

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digest of the social networking space

Published on August 28, 2007 in Social Media and Social Networking. 0 Comments

Jeremiah covers some very interesting points in his round-up on social networking

More and more of our clients are beginning to ask questions about what to do in the Social Networking space. It baffles and befuddles them. They just don’t get it.

Mainly this is to do with not having a conherent ROI in place since the phenomenon of Social Networking – particularly for brands and corporations – is so new, but also it feels to me as if they don’t get it because they haven’t even tried to.

What’s particularly intesresting is the number of white branded solutions out there Here, here and here. The solutions are starting to differentiate. There are a few White Label Social Networks that are offering their product based on a ‘vertical’. Some are offering to be the best Social Network for sports communities, municipals, education, government, and any other industry segment.

What’s been clear so far with brands who’ve attempted to enter the Social Networking space is that they still aren’t using social media to know their audiences. Instead they’re using it as another way to increase sales.

This is a fundamental issue with brands and Social Networking. Social Networking is not about increasing sales, but about increasing brand affinity, trust and loyalty with customers. It’s the increase in these things that will increase sales – not the current ‘hot offer’.

facebook stats

Published on August 28, 2007 in R&D, Social Media and Social Networking. 0 Comments

Shel Isreal emailed Facebook’s corporate communications group to get some accurate numbers. Here’s what he uncovered:

  1. Over 150,000 registrants daily. That’s 1 million a week since January.
  2. 36 million users today. Of course that number will be off a million one week from today.
  3. Half user are outside college. That number was zero in Sept. 2006.
  4. 0ver 40 billion page views in May 2007
  5. Average visitor stays 20 minutes
  6. Most growth is among people over age 25.
  7. 47,000+ Facebook groups.
  8. #1 photo sharing app on the web. 2.7 billion photos on site.
  9. More than 2000 applications. The Top 10 are: Top Friends, Video, Graffiti, MyQuestions, iLike, FreeGifts, X Me, Superpoke!, Fortune Cookie & Horoscopes. The smallest of these has over 4.5 million users.

More on this over on Jeremiah’s site. He’s just joined Forrester research as a Senior Analyst covering social media.

social networks are walled gardens

Published on July 20, 2007 in Social Networking. 0 Comments

The continuing success of Facebook cannot be ignored and it will continue to have mass user adoption at a consumer level for many months, even years, to come. As I mentioned in another post, BooksOnCampus is a website that requires you to login before being able to access the site.
walled garden
When Facebook starts using this identity system as a widget the potential will be for it to become what Microsoft Passport never was. For further insights into Facebook be sure to check out the Inside Facebook blog.

The implication is that Facebook could eclipse OpenID adoption and become the online identity solution. There’s just one problem…currently Google can’t search inside Facebook.

Facebook = Blackhole, Whirlpool, Vortex.

Facebook is a closed garden with one way doors. Data in, but no data out. It’s true that Facebook have opened up their API to developers, but none of the content produced within Facebook’s pages can get out and be indexed or referenced by another company or social network. With so many companies, startups, ecommerce companies building widgets for this platform did anyone stop to consider that they’re not letting data flow out? Matt Dickman agrees, watch his video. Here’s what we should be concerned about:

1) My non-Facebook friends can’t see what I’m doing. If I link to Facebook, you have to register and sign up. That sucks.

2) After I’ve setup my profile, I should have the ability to make my profile public and let folks see the elements I want.

3) What about my network? data? Profile? I want to export those. (Same thing to LinkedIn). The rolodex of today has an important field “friends”. I want to be able to export my network to other systems and applications.

4) As far as I know Facebook doesn’t have RSS…

Facebook (and whichever network follows suit) has a huge opportunity to not just be an application platform, but to be a true identity system for the entire network. Before we start jumping up and down, giving Facebook all of our data, and building our company widgets in Facebook should we first think about whether this is a black hole?

The smaller, more niche social networks or services such as Plaxo and others are building as open a platform as possible, enabling import, export and inter-change across the entire internet and enabling any search engine to find the content you’ve chosen to make public…will the long tail of competitors to Facebook eventually provide a better system to Facebook’s?

trust, word of mouth and the conversation

Published on July 20, 2007 in Social Media and Social Networking. 0 Comments

As Jeremiah Owyang notes:
“Facebook is a closed garden with one-way doors.
This means that data comes in, but it’s not coming out – yet.”

The Inside Facebook blog suggests that Google is not relevant to Facebook since it has it’s own news and feed ranking indexes and systems, its own search tool and its own social network to find information:

“Future information finding systems will evolve to use data from your social network, yielding results based upon your trusted peers” – Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO.

This concept of ‘trust’ is tied to identity and also to the belief that word of mouth advice between friends, families and colleagues is by far the strongest form of marketing around – crucially, it also flies in the face of Google’s current search algorithm which is based on popularity, not accuracy or trust.

If search evolves, will we rely on personal social network features (what do my friends think and recommend) over search? Will we evolve to smaller network based searches?

In many ways, this is what Mahalo was trying to overcome, the problem with that is that I don’t know (and therefore don’t trust) the editors creating the Mahalo data. This is why so many thought leaders are already thinking about their Facebook strategy.

Although Google continues to evolve it’s AI to build better search tools, trust continues to be the leading factor in finding information. Google’s search results have much to be desired: popular is not the same as correct.

The future of search will contain human elements in addition to algorithms.

where next for Social Networking?

Published on July 17, 2007 in Social Networking. 0 Comments

A new report by Research & Markets called ‘The Rise of Social Networking: Trends, Challenges and Strategies’ has been published.

One of the most interesting aspects concerning the current attention Facebook has received is the difference in take up of social networking sites on a country by country basis – particularly in Europe.

Whilst the UK leads the field with more than 1 in 3 internet users registering with Facebook, Germany and Italy are far behind. This makes blanket-wide social networking solutions for EMEA less useful than targeted national digital solutions.

On the back of this, Jeremiah Owyang has an interesting post in which he predicts what he believes is going to be happening in the social networking space soon:

  1. Facebook will launch an Identity widget that can be embeded on to any blog or webpage. This will allow only those who have registered on Facebook to leave a comment. Many high profile blogs will do this to avoid nasty anonymous comments. Here’s an example of a website that requires a Facebook login. It also highlights how Facebook Applications don’t need to sit inside Facebook – Thanks to Jay for the link.
  2. The data collected from these widgets enables Facebook to erode the small marketshare that Attention trackers and MyBlogLog are creating.
  3. Facebook will have faster adoption that Open ID, as the consumer users will drive it.
  4. MySpace will open their platform and enable development with their APIs, all in response to Facebook. Developers will have instances in both networks, and there will be many logins; Myspace, Facebook, and the applications themselves.
  5. White Label social networks will start to offer ability to share data with other networks. Some will never adopt this as their corporate clients want walled gardens around their brand. Additional thoughts by Marc Canter.
  6. Google Groups (SocialStream – demo & specific details – Just check out the makeup of the team!!) and others will launch next generation community sites. These won’t be the generic bulletin boards that we’re accustomed to, but will take shape as widgetized and customized communities, using APIs. More importantly, they will bring new ways to interact across networks. Google studied over 39 social networks and funded Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute research in this area.

    7. Christopher, at Slate magazine, thinks Facebook IS the platform. I happen to concur with Jeremiah Owyang that other platforms will evolve – as he comments, there’s too much at stake.

    It’ll be interesting to see how Brands work with Facebook. I haven’t seen all that much activity as yet. Apart from Redbull which was pointless marketing hype, there isn’t any advertiser which has truly tapped into the potential Facebook offers. MySpace seems to have been crawling with advertising and branded site pages for sometime now – to the detriment of its success.

    One social network cannot and will not be all things to all people, just as MySpace was and then wasn’t THE place to virtually hang out.

Social Media Analysis

Published on July 10, 2007 in R&D, Social Media and Social Networking. 1 Comment

Marianina Chaplin, over at Web Analytics Princess, has written a couple of very interesting posts on “Social networking analysis meets web analytics meets marketing effectiveness” & also “Value networking analysis versus social networking analysis“, along with a link through to the Value Networks Consortium articles.

Social Media Visualisation
In it she goes into detail about how a MIT Media Lab/Social Media Lab study has designed a flexible tool for the content driven exploration and visualization of a social network. More specifically, this tool visualizes the true influence of comment flow from MySpace visitors.

Juda Phillips of Web Analytics Demystified writes about “Web Analytics and Social Networks” and also here.

I have no background in analytics, but my interest in it is based on wanting to better serve the audiences I build digital solutions and experiences for. As the metaphor of the page click-through dwindles and we see more thought being given towards monitoring what people are actually doing with their time on a site or within an application, I hope that we’ll be able to substantiate what the knock on effects are for the members of that social network which are touched by it.

I’m intrigued by engagement. I began my social network experience as a lurker. As I have become more comfortable with, and more confident in, using these social tools I am finding myself taking part and engaging in more of the conversation. I’m not alone, as the daily activity on my Facebook newsfeed can vouch for.

I think that many of the people who have signed up to Facebook, but who had not previously delved into MySpace, felt that the interface was a barrier to them i.e. actually doing stuff on it. Facebook is easier to use – ironcially because it doesn’t offer the level of individualism that MySpace was initailly celebrated for. For example, preventing people from changing the look and feel of their profile page and building an online community based on the people you already know cuts to the essence of social networking – which to me is maintaining relationships online with friends you have offline, however distant.

As more and more people feel at ease not only posting their own photos onto Facebook, but also commenting on the photos that others in their network have uploaded and truly engaged in, you’re able to build a detailed picture about the types of people they are, their interests, their likes and dislikes etc…I feel it’s this untapped knowledge which will lead to a much more considered approach to marketing and advertising in general, rather than the traditional method of ramming slogans and broken promises down people’s throats.

Facebook applications

Published on July 9, 2007 in application, Social Media and Social Networking. 0 Comments

Tony over at Teknision has an update to a post his partner in crime Gabor posted a month or so ago that’s worth reading. In it they both discuss and refine the types of application that are currently being built on Facebook.

I’ve been in a load of discussions at work with people who want to create Facebook applications for clients and the 3 types Teknision have formulated are a good way of describing the current state of play.

However, I’m not sure they go far enough and they also don’t mention the types of application (For Facebook, For the Desktop and For the Web).

The popularity of these applications are really interesting, particularly if you take Teknision’s views on board. Whilst the most popular application for Facebook has just tipped 8.1million, the most popular application for your Desktop, the Facebook toolbar for Firefox, has only 161,000 and for the Web, Jobster has been downloaded a total of 33,000 times.

These figures go to show how confused and untapped the Facebook application landscape is and explains why brands have been slow to create their own branded applications for Facebook…so far.

Social Media Marketing Tactics

Published on March 25, 2007 in Social Media and Social Networking. 0 Comments

30 social network sites are taken to task and broken down by Jane Copeland. She has put together a interesting piece titled “Social Media Marketing Tactics”. Instead of focusing on the usual social media sites, Jane looks at 30 different sites, their good and bad points, and who their target is. Jane provides a good overview of these sites and introduces somes new ones that you have probably not heard of before.

The US Presidential Candidature

Published on February 3, 2007 in Social Media, Social Networking and video distribution. 0 Comments

…is an excellent way of citing the differences and knowledge between the campaign teams and how they’re using the internet and digital media. I think it’s important for two reasons. It’s important because the US election will be won on-line and it’ll be won by the candidate who is able to react to and converse with the US citizens the best.

Continue reading ‘The US Presidential Candidature’

Traditional newspapers battle online competiton

Published on December 11, 2006 in Social Networking. 0 Comments

Traditional newspapers are finally having to react to the popularity of online competitors. This has been inevitable for some time now, but newspapers have typically been slow to react and never certain about why or what they should be doing in order to counter the online socail news phenomenon. Continue reading ‘Traditional newspapers battle online competiton’

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