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Social Media Sandwich

July 25, 2010 in Online, Social by Anthony | 1 comment

Salami and salad are an aggregate of different ingredients. Both salami and salad are diverse, mixing a range of different yet similar stuff into the one package, a lot like Twitter and Facebook. Combining so much into one easily consumed package is almost revolutionary in a world where meat offcuts and lettuce had until that time stood alone, solitary and distinct – somewhat similar to what was seen with Web 2.0, where user generated content was spread across sites like Geocities and other free hosts to be replaced with Myspace and Blogger, sites and tools that connected and generated content like never before.

Social Media Sandwich

Why not go further? Why not move from a boring world of plates, knives and forks, to a place where salami and salad can be enjoyed at the same time between two pieces of bread? The sandwich is a truly revolutionary construct. Taking the best of both foods and making them available in the one easy to consume package through the medium of baked goods.

How do you eat it? Must you use a plate, can you carry it with you, maybe it is only available in a specific restaurant and you can’t take it away? Or is it the übermensch of sandwiches and able to be eaten in whatever way you see fit, and if so, is this the revolutionary development? There are a lot of content aggregation tools available now, from Friendfeed through to Google Buzz, Windows Live Messenger Beta and device specifc tools like MOTOBLUR, Flipboard and Google’s Social Search. They vary greatly in capabilities, sources of media they can access and curation tools, but they perform the same task for the user.

A lot of these services and tools take a few social media activity streams and create a single feed, but a few index or include the content linked to and present it to the user directly. Flipboard delivers this content in the app, and Google Social Search presents the links in a results page of a relevant search query.

Questions of fair use and legality aside, providing socially sourced content from multiple sources in the one place with tools to make this information manageable is a significant development in how the Internet is used. From Google’s personalisation of search to the increasing importance of social networks for filtering content and the shift away from static portals, each user’s experience of the Internet is becoming more unique.

Tags: Community, Content, Facebook, Google, internet, Online, Social, Social Media, Twitter

Your Company’s Fragmented Web Presence

July 21, 2010 in Online, Search, Social by Anthony | No comments

Brands do not just have one touchpoint anymore. There are a lot of sites with different tools, an established audience, and people creating content about about many things, including companies and brands. From a company Facebook page or group to augmented reality brand hacking or conversations on Twitter, content created by Internet users about brands is more visible and varied than ever.

Why the Site

Devoting all content creation and administration resources to single site or community is no longer the best strategy. Internet users seek out different content in different formats for different platforms. What meets their needs on their mobile phones will be different to what they want on their desktop computer, or their netbook, web-enabled TV, or tablet device. After all, social media is just people being people online, and what they use and how is a result of this.

The kind of platform and task they want to complete changes how they search for, evaluate and use content. From asking their social network for advice, to searching for product demonstrations on YouTube or store locations on Google Maps.

There is a need for the ‘Big Website’ and campaign or product specific microsites. While there is a need for control over a hub to facilitate list building, acquire links and generate direct navigation traffic, sites and microsites will be a part of the mix. While Facebook is not likely to suffer the same fate as Blogetery, developing content on external platforms also comes with a certain level of risk.

Being visible across multiple, relevant platforms, sites and communities gives brands the chance to manage the user’s experience of the brand. Providing compelling content and engaging with customers, the brand can develop on its campaigns further, ensure that customer service queries can be responded to and clarify information about their products.

Creating brand touchpoints like fan pages is an “as well as”, not an “instead of” developing microsites and promoting the the brand’s main web presence. They are an opportunity to put content in front of the customer in the place that they already are, and in a format tailored for the situation. A YouTube channel, Second Life store and a Facebook page are not a substitute for the spaces online that the brand controls.

Comic from Why the Site

Tags: Community, Facebook, internet, Marketing, Media, Micro sites, Online, Social, Social Media, Twitter

Anticipating Social Gone Wrong

June 22, 2010 in Online, Social by Anthony | No comments

For open, transparent companies with an amazing product and service experience, social media engagement can create huge benefits, but like most things in business there are risks.

Social media is just people being people online, but with better tools. Nothing has changed in their behaviour; it is their ability to be found and heard, and find others who think the same that is new and significant. Social media and the internet amplify the voices of those who publish content online, whether they love you or hate you.

Sometimes people will say things that businesses would prefer them not to. The internet has made it easier than ever to publish and spread this material. Sites like Facebook and WordPress make it easy to tap into an existing audience, or get indexed by Google and appear in brand searches. When a product or service has a branded social media presence or community, it can give them access to a highly relevant audience for their dissatisfaction, ire and angst, which can disrupt the business’ promotional activity and damage the brand.

It is hard to completely avoid this risk without losing the benefits from fostering conversation and building online communities. Here are a few ways a business can prepare to address these problems if or when they arise:

Anticipate the negative responses and plan on how and how not to respond
Make internal stakeholders aware of what can go wrong
Communicate response plans and processes internally with key stakeholders
Ensure that those with the authority to respond in negative situations are easily reached
Make staff aware of relevant policies

If no thought is given to what might go wrong, there is a greater risk of the company responding badly, and inflaming the situation further. Planning for problems that may arise before the fact ensures that the business’ response will most likely be timely, articulate and appropriate.

Tags: Community, Facebook, Fans, internet, Marketing, Online, promotion, Social, Social Media

Social TV & the Back channel

May 30, 2010 in Online, Social by Anthony | No comments

People have always connected over common experiences; it creates communities. Sporting events, product launches and TV shows are all important Social Artefacts, and are a part of many communities’ shared experience. State of Origin, Lost, the iPad launch are all examples of public events that form a focus for interaction for many different groups. A lot of this activity is now happening online, through fan pages, hashtags, forums and general conversation.

A lot of people watch TV and discuss it with others watching the same things. Online Back channel conversations around TV shows, live events, launches and sport are more visible than before, thanks to platforms like Twitter and Facebook, adding an interactive social dimension to an otherwise passive experience. This behaviour is not new, but it used to be confined to narrow interest groups in their own online communities, with little visibility to those who are not already directly engaged.

TV’s place as a standalone source of entertainment and information has diminished over the last decade. The proliferation of mobile Internet-capable devices such as laptops, netbooks and smartphones have made it easy to consume content and interact with others while watching TV. This behaviour will probably become even more prominent in future, especially with products like Google TV.

There is a very interesting section in the Google TV Developers area:

Remember that TV is social.

Consider how groups might use your website or application.

Offer ways for individuals to use your site or apps in social settings.

Integrating the Back channel conversations around the content, and making it more visible than even Twitter’s hashtags will enhance the experience for the average user. With most social networks supporting cross-posting, posting out to the user’s Twitter and Facebook feeds from the TV based app, even a message as simple as “/me is watching Show” would be an effective form of social proof for the show exposed to the user’s friends. Similar tools are already being used by games.

Once a best practice has been established for TV as a platform, in terms of interface and hardware useability, this may be the killer app that keeps TV in the living room, and not just for consoles, media boxes, or Blu-Ray players.

Tags: Back channel, Community, Emergent Behaviour, Facebook, Games, Google, Google TV, Social, Social Media, TV, Twitter

What is the value of your privacy?

May 13, 2010 in Advertising, Online, Social by Anthony | No comments

For value for money it is hard to top Facebook. It costs nothing and in return you can host photos and videos, communicate with people all over the world, consume vast amounts of content, create groups and participate in various communities. To create and host something similar yourself would cost a lot of time and money.

Free sites and services like Facebook, YouTube, and Google Search still have to pay their developers, provide hosting, repay investors and generate revenue to keep it all going. Traffic, registered users and great PR do not pay the bills by themselves; at some point cash needs to be involved. This is where the interests of those providing the services and those using them diverge.

Free at a price

There will always be a cost to the end user, and if it is not cash it will be something else. Lack of technical support, poor documentation, slow bug fixes, compromised privacy and exposure to advertising are a few ways operating costs are managed and paid for. Some paid services suffer some of these issues as well, but they are not the norm.

When the user pays, there is a clear cost in losing them and therefore higher expectations of service. When the service is free and the costs are paid for by advertisers and investors, creating value for them is important for the business. The advertising model is often the first choice for generating revenue and targeted traffic or impressions, and richer forms of display advertising become more important. When the user pays, creating value for them becomes important to the business.

Facebook appears to be going through this process now. A lot of the recent changes seem to create more value for advertisers than for some segments of their community. With Facebook being such a dominating presence, this is generating a lot of discussion. With all this focus on user control over data and experience, Diaspora could not have begun development at a better time.

Will you pay?

Diaspora as a social media platform will be interesting, and potentially very disruptive to this space. It looks easily accessible for many users, either through Turnkey or individually installed and operated servers. As a distributed network of easily installed and managed ‘Seeds’ across a variety of servers, Diaspora can be compared to WordPress. Based on the offers on Kickstart for funding, it seems that while the software will be free, access to Turnkey servers and technical support will cost money.

Diaspora at the very least will place a dollar value on privacy and control over your social media profiles, and it will ask one other question: Will you pay for access to a social media platform, either through hosting or a Turnkey server?

Tags: Community, data, Diaspora, Facebook, internet, Network, Online, Social, Social Media, Wordpress

The Network Effect as a Bell Curve

May 11, 2010 in Online, Social by Anthony | 7 comments

Social media sites depend on the Network Effect, or Network Externality. Obviously Twitter, Facebook and so on would be useless if you were the only person to ever login or publish information. I would argue that the usefulness of a transparent social network as a place to share personal information with friends or others declines as the population increases.

Network Effect as a Bell Curve

Populated by purported ‘social media gurus’ or bored IT staff. That’s it.

Early adopters can find their immediate circle of friends.

That guy who made primary school miserable for you wants to become your friend.

Ignoring your coworkers’ friend requests becomes harder to sustain.

Boomers are commenting on their kids’ party photos, thanks to friends tagging them.

Traditional media is reporting on all of those off-colour pages your profile links to, as funny as they were at the time.

The graph charts a hypothetical relationship between the population size and the level of engagement in a transparent social network. The points on the curve are more illustrative than literal.

As the number of people in a social network increases, the amount of control an individual has over their profile erodes. The causes can range from a lack of understanding of privacy controls, progressive loss of privacy due to changes in the site’s settings or even incidental information posted about you by others in your network.

In this environment people learn to hold more of themselves back. They share less and start to use social networks to project a controlled image of themselves for social and professional purposes. Sometimes they move their more open interactions to a different, more controllable platform, like Diaspora promises to be.

Leaving a densely populated social site is not the answer; changes in behaviour are far more likely than abandonment of established networks. Do you think this is the case? Are your habits changing as more people become a part of your extended networks? Or do you continue to share?

Tags: Community, internet, Online, Social, Social Media

Microsoft, Bing and Spindex being Social

May 9, 2010 in Online, Social by Anthony | No comments

Shop and Share with Bing was announced earlier this week. Integrating sharing links within product searches is not exactly groundbreaking. The idea that social proof works to drive purchasing behaviour online is not new. A number of different sites such as mypicklist.com (now gone), ThisNext.com and Amazon through their ratings and owned product lists support this. What is interesting is that this is another way in which Search Engines are beginning to act like portals.

The team behind Bing has shown a willingness to be as creative as Google in their approach to search. From launch, Bing has been referred to as a decision engine, and they seem focused on this goal. The Microsoft Fuse Labs Spindex project using Bing certainly matches this aim. It is an inclusive integration of the user’s social network into their search experience. The Search Engine Result Page (SERP) is influenced by the behaviour of members of the user’s social networks. This looks like an extension of what Google is doing with Social Search and in a way is a good demonstration of just how pervasive a social Internet can be.

The Preview of the new Windows Live Messenger also shows real intent to move into this area. Bringing social content together through a stand alone application, one which millions of people will certainly already have installed on their computers at some point, will be interesting.

Between a fragmenting web and social content being used across multiple platforms and tools including search and general content discovery, the online experience of any two people attempting to complete the same task will very rarely match. There are a number of ways to move around this, such as building a branded query space, becoming the portal or controlling the platform or device they use. Of course not adapting is always an option as well.

Tags: Bing, Community, Google, internet, Online, Social, Social Media

A Million Different Internets

April 25, 2010 in Advertising, Online by Anthony | No comments

Almost no-one accesses the Internet. What most users access is a selection information determined to varying degrees by their own behaviour, and the nature of the gatekeepers, such as ISP, browsers, applications, DNS, platforms, language, social networks and online nodes such as search engines and portal sites. The Internet has always been a media especially prone to creating silos of information and homogeneous communities, however increasingly behavioural and real world factors are having a greater impact than before.

Organic factors such as user interest and active social behaviour has always influenced what a person might see and experience online. Someone with no interest or no friends who are interested in esoteric information like Babylon 5 are not likely to hear much about it if they do not actively seek it. There is less chance of being exposed to information they have no interest in on the Internet than in most mass media. Of course the larger the social network of the individual and the greater their direct involvement, the more information outside of their immediate sphere of interest they will be exposed to.

None of these factors are unique to the Internet. The tools available online make it possible to interact with more people in some way then was even possible before. The speed and diversity of content that can be shared online has no parallel in history, but ultimately, it’s just people being people online. What has become increasingly important is the influence of location, device, software and sites or platforms that actively use user generated data to shape your online experience.

The technology to change what is shown by IP, cookies, logged in accounts, OS and browsers are not a new innovation. Their implementation online is becoming more apparent with more obvious use and a proliferation of Internet capable devices in the population. This trend covers commercial sites, social media, news and search engines. It affects content from advertising, articles through to search listings.

Personalised Search

Currently, one of the most interesting things about Personalised Search is the averages users complete ignorance of it. Personalisation of content thought to be consistent for all who access it will have interesting social ramifications. Most users are not actually aware that their own behaviour, and at some point the behaviour of people they are connected to through their Google products, will have an effect on what appears where in their search results.

Google has for a lot of people become a portal, with users retrieving information through the search box with keywords they have learnt, or told to use. This change in user experience of information retrieval for sites other than brand and generic terms may discourage users from being so totally dependant on Google Search acting as a replacement for sharing and directing accessing URLs.

Cross Platform Content Consumption

Not all content works on all platforms. Mobile browsers are far more sophisticated than they were when WAP was the standard, and most web content is now easily accessible on mobile devices, with a few notable exceptions such as flash. Due to differences in screen size and interface some sites will serve a different site to different devices.

Location Aware

With IP addresses, the ability to serve different content to users from different locations has been available for ages. No where is this more apparent then in search. What is new is how location aware applications are now using device APIs to access information from the GPS chip. This location data makes it possible to serve information based on a far more granular level than is possible through IP addresses.

User Experience and Advertising

Delivering the right message to the right person in the right place at the right time is as important for advertising as it can be for sharing information. Delivering relevant information from trusted sources in the right place and time to a user who has demonstrated an interest does go a long way towards managing the huge volume of information available. There is a cost associated with this, including privacy and an increasingly myopic view on the Internet, especially with content that is currently assumed by the average user to be consistent for all.

Tags: Advertising, Community, data, internet, Online, Search, Search Engines, SEM, Social, Social Media

Microsoft, Social and Gaming

April 3, 2010 in Online, Social by Anthony | 1 comment

Microsoft is the least talked about company in social media, yet they are involved in email, online gaming and provide personal profiles to millions of accounts. Windows Live is the online space that ties Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail and Xbox Live profiles together. This also includes their blog platform, online groups and other social tools.

All users of Hotmail, Messenger, or Xbox Live automatically have a Windows Live ID, a single login that gives the user access to many Microsoft services. From ComScore’s 2 Million More Australians Go Social in 2009 report, Microsoft Live’s web presence had 1,962,000 unique visits in June 2009, just behind MySpace in Australia.

This does not include people using Microsoft’s services such as Xbox Live and Windows Live Messenger. With the addition of more web services to Xbox Live, Microsoft is certain to increase the use of their social platforms.

The first thing that struck me about the Microsoft Live profile pages and tools is the lack of opacity within its network. There are not many tools for sharing content or for finding new connections compared to sites like Facebook. It is easy to aggregate content from Flickr, RSS feeds and a number of other sources on the profile page but there is a lack of third party tools and applications. Microsoft’s main strength lies in their other products, and not in their web presence. In future it is their gaming platform and email services that will expand their reach.

In this regard, the most significant development for Microsoft will be cross platform gaming, encompassing Xbox360, mobile and desktop computing.

Xbox Live gives its users the ability to find new connections, share relevant content and access a lot of third party content via DLC games. It also provides a structured environment with engaging tasks, much in the same way that MMORPGs do the same for the social environments they create. There are other platforms that incorporate a gaming mechanic (Foursquare.com), have third party developers build one (Facebook.com), or have seen one emerge from user interaction (Twitter.com). It will be interesting to see how cross platform gaming, and applications in general, evolve in both their functionality and in how they are used going forward.

Tags: Community, Computer, Cross platform, Desktop, email, Gaming, internet, Laptop, Microsoft, Mobile, Online, Social, Social Media, Statistics, Xbox360

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