Socialesque Blog

In the not so distant past Facebook introduced an API that gives access to a user’s status updates. By ’status’, we mean the sort of information that first became commonplace with IM, when users would let their contacts know whether they were online and how available they were — busy, on a call, in a meeting, out of the office, whatever. This tradition has been built on and amplified by users of the Twitter microblogging service: “… a status message … is massively conversational (something we didn’t quite realize until Twitter users invented the @reply).”

Status is important because it provides the individual’s real-time context. That can be a prompt for action (”I’m three blocks away, let’s meet for coffee”), a source of information (”As you’re running late, I’ll move our meeting back an hour”), or even part of a business process (”While you’re there, can you see if they got that delivery OK?”). We are going to see continued innovation in and around the status message. We can use filtering, semantics, indentity, social graphs, and a host of other important technologies to weave a real-time web around status.

How many of those innovations will have relevance in the business world and what are the business models that would allow businesses to see the practical relevance of social computing those are the million actually make it billion dollar questions!

April 13th, 2009 | Tags: Business Models, Facebook, Social Networks, Twitter | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

This is an excellent post on Metrics Insider by Judah Phillips.

In 2009, Web analytics managers have a multitude of different tools to select to deploy at their corporation.  Sets of tools from industry leaders, such as Omniture, WebTrends, Unica, CoreMetrics , Google, and Yahoo, are among the most popular, while options from smaller players like ClickTracks and Woopra exist as well.  In theory, you deploy a tool, customize it to fit your needs, and start analyzing the reports — and it all goes swimmingly, right?

Then why have many corporations already chewed through two, maybe even three tools over the last several years, or deployed multiple tools in an attempt to arrive at where they need to be — delivering comprehensive and systematic analysis to their business community, helping to drive action from insight and taking the mantra of “competing on analytics” and “data driven culture” to the next level?  Several factors cause disconnects between the promise of a tool and the successful use of a tool, which cause a tool to fail:

Inability to customize to business needs.  As sites adopt more and more AJAX, Flash, and Web 2.0 technologies like video, social media, and RSS, many Web analytics tools do not have features necessary to track these new media.  The catalyst for change comes when the business desires to track events on the site and can’t using the current tool, so the company begins to search for a new tool that can.    

Training.  A corporation must hire or train people who understand how to use a tool.  It doesn’t always follow that because someone knows how to use Tool X, they can easily move over to using Tool Y.  If a corporation doesn’t budget both the time and money to extend its team’s ability to use a tool, the tool will not be effectively wielded and will wither on the vine.  It’s important to allocate resources to ensure your staff has the most current training available; otherwise, the tools you have could be considered useless because they can’t be employed effectively, which leads to the exploration of alternatives and the subsequent purchase of other tools.

Lack of analytical resources.  Not a tool problem per se, but this issue reflects itself in an inability to quickly and agilely respond to business requests to extend the tool, provide data, or, worse yet, analyze the data.  If a company can’t dedicate sufficient resources to using and extending a tool and analyzing the data collected, a business can quickly conclude the tool, rightly or wrongly, has little to no value and seek alternatives.

Too much aggregated data.  Most Web analytics tools provide cumulative sums of data at the visit level.  They will tell you “you have had X instances of Y.”  What most tools won’t tell you is how a particular visitor or groups of segmented visitors behave on the site.  For those companies that want to do targeted email campaigning based on understanding visitor level data or evaluating the performance of ad campaigns on a per campaign ad creative basis based on visitor behavior, many web analytics tools just can’t meet that business requirement.  Or, the analytics tool may require multiple applications that weren’t purchased to fulfill the vision. 

Inordinate complexity.  The idea of analytics tool deployment and extension being “easy” is somewhat of a joke in analytic’s circles. The difficultly and complexity in taking full advantage of a web analytics tool is in how you extend it to meet your business needs.  And many tools make it less than intuitive or in the worse case way too hard to extend a tool across an enterprise — from challenges with page tagging, to orchestrating changes to page tagging, to QAing tags and reports, to building out a custom schema to requiring the configuration and integration of additional applications to deliver against requirements .  When these things go wrong, companies get frustrated and seek alternative solutions often abandoning a tool in the process.

Many other reasons exist, of course, for why tools fail (cost, infrastructures, data availability, and so on), but I think the five issues I’ve mentioned above are some of the primary drivers for tool change in the corporate world.  But now I ask you, the experts, why has your Web analytics tool failed you and caused you to switch to another solution?

April 10th, 2009 | Tags: Web Analytics | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (3)

Here are a few takeaways from The Secrets of Social Media Seminar that took place last week:

1. Viral marketing is now predictable.
Yes, it’s true. Who would have ever guessed that one day we would be able to predict viral marketing? Its called “Social Velocity”, a secret formula that can be used to literally harness viral marketing for just about anything.

Here is a recent publication on the subject: Harnessing Social Media

2. Social networking is a process and is very rewarding

3. Whatever social media platforms you use make sure your message resonates with that particular audience.

4. Benefits of Using Social Media

• Builds Trust

• Creates Engagement

• Starts a Conversation

• Reveals previously untapped collective intelligence

• Develops networking opportunities for business and personal endeavors

6. Ways to Gauge Your Social Media Readiness:

• Listen to your customers

• Know who your customers are

• Find out who the voices of your company are

• Define your goals for using Social Media

• Determine what resources you have to allocate to Social Media projects

Of course if you need a way to measure the engagement of your audience you might want to talk to us!

April 7th, 2009 | Tags: Customer Engagment, Social Media, Viral Marketing | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

A very interesting article just appeared on Time.com describing why Social Networks maynot always make a good business. In some of my earlier blogs, I talked about the need to have a strong business model and value proposition for Facebook to succeed. Thats why I gave Twitter a much higher probability of success than Facebook. 

I am reproducing the Time.com article by Douglas McIntyre here becuase it drives home the point far better than I can. 

The business of having online sites with content created by amateurs to be viewed by other amateurs never had a reasonable chance of making money. The fact that at one point Facebook had a $15 billion valuation, that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (NWS) bought MySpace, and that Google (GOOG) bought YouTube only proves the “greater fool” theory.

YouTube was started in 2005 and MySpace in 2003. Normally, having a social network where people go to share profiles of themselves, write blogs, and submit videos would not seem like much of a business. But MySpace has well over 100 million users. People viewed over five billion videos at YouTube last month. Investors assumed that any medium with such a large number of users has to become a huge business. Millions and millions of users must be worth something. They can’t be worth nothing. That couldn’t be possible. (See pictures of the meteoric rise of YouTube.)

Because Facebook and MySpace are so pervasive and such a significant part of online culture, the press is endlessly fascinated by what goes on at the companies. Word got out that Facebook was raising money. Then it fired its chief financial officer. Analysts started to speculate that the company was low on cash. Facebook, of course, said that no such thing was true. (Read “25 Things I Didn’t Want to Know About You.”)

What is true is that social network sites have had trouble making money. MySpace was supposed to be a big part of the revenue growth at News Corp. Wall St. thought Murdoch was a genius to buy it. Last year, News Corp had to admit that MySpace would not hit its revenue targets. That is usually not the hallmark of a property that is going to take over the Internet. Analysts believe that MySpace rival Facebook had revenue of $265 million last year. That is astonishingly low for a company that had 57 million unique visitors in the U.S. last month. And, Facebook also has a very large international user base. (Read: “MySpace Launches a Free-Music Revolution.”)

The reason that social networks will never do well financially is that they break from the successful model that has brought so many marketers to the internet. Display advertising can be targeted by subject. Financial advertisers run messages on AOL Finance (TWX) and TheStreet.com (TSCM). They avoid sites for children’s video games. Search sites like Google refined the model by allowing advertisers to buy search engine results pages. The Google results’ pages for the search “heart doctors in New York City” is probably the best place in the world for heart doctors in New York City to market themselves. (See pictures of Google Earth.)

Social networks are bogs filled with people who are there to befriend one another, tell their stories, or voice their complaints. For those who want others to know all about them or who have unrevealed grievances about life, these are wonderful online destinations. They are a good place to leave messages for friends, propose marriage, and post the scores from the local high school football team. They are not a place where an advertiser can focus on a single group with a message aimed at those people, because no one knows exactly who those people are. For a company trying to sell products or services, Facebook is mayhem in a PC. What the advertiser wants is traditional, orderly content.

With the exception of a certain number of perverts who sneak in, there is nothing wrong with social networks, but marketers don’t want the perverts and they don’t want a collection of people with no common purpose other than to share with one another.

I believe what Doug refers to is the mindset. If a prospect is not “seeking” something then no matter what you do they are not going to buy it. That might be an exaggeration but the truth is that it is a not profitable to sell to an audience that is not seeking your product. On Facebook, people seek “socialization” and that is very hard to monetize!

April 1st, 2009 | Tags: Business Models, Facebook, Twitter | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (3)

A better question is does Facebook have any core competence … I have a sneaking suspiscion that Facebook is falling into the trap of being everything to everyone. While thats a good dream, it is very rarely real. Every successful company has had a core competence and Facebook needs to find, define and evolve its own.

Facebook made a number of announcements today about changes to its home page, profile pages, and activity streams. Taken together, these represent a concerted response to the rise of Twitter as a real-time message broadcasting system that goes beyond members’ personal circle of friends.

Facebook is also speeding up the updates that populate the news feeds on everyone’s personal page. Before, these would be updated every 10 minutes or so. Facebook’s introduction of real-time updates and a one-sided follow system mimics Twitter’s functionality. While it may be a little late to this part of the game, its user base of 175 million dwarf’s Twitter’s. Explains CEO Mark Zuckerberg:

What we’re talking about today, is that there’s a philosophical change in that we want to converge these public figures (which are one way) and friends (two way connections).

Throughout the press conference Facebook emphasized the importance of the activity stream along with the social graph (which is the map of social connections between members). Chris Cox, Facebook’s director of product development, put it this way:

The stream is what is happening. We think it is as core as the graph. The graph is the connections, the stream is what is happening.

These changes will become evident front-and-center on the homepage. Says Zuckerberg:

With the new homepage, that will reflect a much faster flow of information.

The redesigned homepage will allow users to sort through and filter their feed more easily. Updates will be able to be filtered by groups, specific friends, family, or by applications. A new publishing box for sharing updates will incorporate the ability to add not just status notes, but also links, photos, and videos. A new widget will highlight items from friends and other connections members interact with the most. In this way, Facebook is trying to strike a balance between its traditional strength as a private communication system and the increasingly public connections being made on the service as well.

Facebook is trying to shore itself up as the foundation for a living, rapid-fire Web where the line between private messages and public content is blurred. Under no circumstances does it want to cede the thought stream of its users to Twitter.  

Problem in my mind is that Twitter is doing one thing … and doing it really well. Facebook on the other hand is allover the the place with no particular focus. In this battle of David v/s Goliath, I have a sneaking suspiscion that David will win again!

March 5th, 2009 | Tags: Business Models, Facebook, Twitter | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

A recent study by InsightExpress, exploring participation trends across social networks, as well as how receptive their members are to advertising, found that  43% of the online population reports using a social networking site.  And, no matter their age or number of profiles, social networkers see advertising as a hot topic.Another study by Netpop , “Social Networkers US,”  shows that social networkers are much more likely to shop and spend more online than their non-contributing peers. The study found that social networking has grown 93% since 2006 and 76% of US broadband users (105 million) are active contributors to the web via social media. In addition, approximately 29%, or 40 million broadband users, are regular contributors to the web specifically through social networking sites and are spending increasing amounts of their online time communicating with each other, both one-to-one and one-to-many.

The top sources used by social networkers when making shopping decisions are search engines, brand or manufacturer sites, online-only retail sales and auction sites. Some 6% also use social networking sites to decide what to buy.

Insight found that social networkers, when asked how willing they are to see advertising on their social network, claim that they are less willing to view marketing messages on sites where it is currently most obvious.

This preference reinforces the idea that social networks are a unique medium in which advertising campaigns must be executed with great care.

The broad… acceptance of social networking reinforces the distinct need to develop targeted and relevant campaigns for this channel… recognizing the rapid growth of social networking audiences, advertisers have focused on creative engagement… to apply their brands within a new environment. 

The Insight study suggests that opt-in ads seem to be the best route for advertisers to leverage the opportunities provided by these platforms with 40% of social networkers condoning this practice. Only 20% of respondents give behavior-based campaigns the green light.

Response to the concept of randomly generated ads depended on the site, notes Insight, with 23% of LinkedIn, Facebook, Classmates, MySpace, and Reunion profilers saying this approach is acceptable , while 43% of Cafemom, Twitter, and Flickr users find it acceptable.

In looking at the social network landscape, Netpop offers these Key findings about US social networkers:      

• Social networkers in the US are most likely to be single, employed women, age 18-39 and living somewhere between Indiana and the Atlantic Ocean, or along the west coast
• A typical social networker connects weekly with an average of 18 people one-to-one, and 110 people one-to-many
• Social networkers spend an average of 36% of their online time talking and sharing. This compares with 29% for non-contributors to social networks
• Social networkers use multiple modes to communicate and stay in touch. These include IM, texts, blogs and microblogs

The report says that social networkers spend 36% of their Online time talking and sharing, contrasted to only 29% of non-networkers.

The Insight study reports that, of those individuals who participate in a social networking site, 71% have profiles on two or more different properties, with 26% having established four or more profiles.

Among social networkers who report having two or three profiles:

1. 25.6% are 18 to 24 yearss old
2. 23.3% are 25 to 34 years olds
3. 14.7% are 35 to 44 years old
4. 15.6% are 45 to 54 years old
5. 18.4% are 55 to 64 years old

Among people with four or more profiles:

• 31 percent are between the ages of 25 and 34
• 14.1 percent are 55 to 64 years old

Finally the study hypothesizes - Social media will play the same role in this recession that movies played in the Depression… Brands that experiment in social advertising now will be in the best position to leverage these important media channels when the economy turns the corner.

February 27th, 2009 | Tags: Advertising, Marketing, Research, Social Networks | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I saw a great email that outlined tips and lessons about social media marketing and how to engage. I am reproducing part of the email here.

1.     It’s not free. There are plenty of free social media tools out there.  You can certainly set up a MySpace brand page or LinkedIn profile for free.  However, no social media program will succeed without time, resources and expertise. Invest in your talent and give them the room to test new ideas and learn about the audiences they serve.

2.    Being present is not enough. Put up a corporate-speak Facebook page and see who comes.  Not so many, right?  But a Facebook page that has a cause or purpose is interesting because it’s meaningful and engaging.  At the same time, tell no one about your page and it’s all but invisible. It is not true that “just because we create, they will come.”   Response is driven by active engagement and relevancy (and good timing).

3.    Be authentic. This is a universal marketing truth, but worth mentioning because too many social programs lack it.  Our customers know when they are being sold.  Relevance, honesty, believability, integrity: these are the only things that create value and drive predictable response.

4.    Integrate, don’t imitate. Replicating your website on Facebook does not a compelling and engaging destination make.  Posting your email offers on Twitter will quickly tire followers.   Selling product may not be the best objective of your social strategy.  Perhaps your blog is about education and driving inquiries.  Your MySpace brand community may be about reach for video ads.  Twitter may be a great customer service outreach tool. Use your digital and direct channels in support of each other - not to overwhelm your audience. Blogs can significantly improve search results to your Web site.

5.    Endorsements matter. Social media pulls the marketer off the brand pedestal and drags her into the throes of the messy, wild, unpredictable community.  In this equality, social media empowers brand advocates. Content is only forwarded because it speaks to the subscriber and s/he aspires to own the message. Now subscribers “SWYN” — share with your network — expanding the reach further.

6.    Measure well. All investments in social media must be linked to a business goal.  Clicks and impressions do not matter to executives — all that matters is contribution to the bottom line.  Branding, retention, loyalty and share of wallet can be measured if the data is collected and trended over time, and by audience segment.

7.    Have something to say. This is perhaps most important.  Don’t start talking until you have something valuable to say.  Make the commitment and stick to it.  Fund it.  Be ready to maintain it. We are successful only when we make it less about us and more about our customers.

It takes two to tango - brands and consumers. That is the essence of the social Web 2.0 world.

Give the community members engaging, interesting, relevant content and offers that are worth reading and talking about and they will give you sales and loyalty.

February 26th, 2009 | Tags: Facebook, Marketing, Research, Social Media, Twitter | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

In a post on techcrunch it was revealed that plaYce has announced the beta launch of its Game-Platform-as-a-Service, aimed at assisting game developers bring high-quality 3D game play right into the browser. Games in plaYce are based on 3D renderings of real cities such as San Francisco and New York.

plaYce is targeting independent game developers who will be able to port existing games or build new ones from scratch. The company’s Game-Platform-as-a-Service includes:

• Game Streaming – Where the user’s current and predicted point of view in the game define what piece of data needs to be upload to the client.
• Graphics Engine – In-browser complex rendering including soft shadows, shaders, lights, particle effects, etc.
• Game Arenas - Currently San Francisco, Manhattan and a few large open terrain areas, with two major European cities and Hong Kong on the way. Game developers can also model 3D arenas in any standard 3D modeling tool and then import it. Game arenas that “float in space” are also supported.
• Facebook & OpenSocial Integration – Allows users to import friends into games.
• Micro transaction & Virtual Goods – Game developers will be able to implement these in any game.
• In-game advertising – Provided through Massive and Double Fusion.
• Services – Game lobby, security, asset management, quality of service.

The integration between social networks, online gaming and casual gaming is fascinating. If they can achieve better quality graphics than the casual web based games and combine that with the fun factor and instant gratification achieved by casual games and social networks -  this could be big.

February 25th, 2009 | Tags: Games, Online Games, Social Networks | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

As predicted in an earlier post, Facebook has retracted their T&Cs

A couple of weeks ago, we posted an update to our Terms of Use that we hoped would clarify some parts of it for our users. Over the past couple of days, we have received a lot of questions and comments about these updated terms and what they mean for people and their information. Because of the feedback we received, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

Perhaps this means that they have realized their true value is their users or maybe they are just bowing to the power of the crowds … regardless of the reason, its even more imperative that they find a working business model that does not alienate their audience.

February 18th, 2009 | Tags: Business Models, Facebook | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment