Profiting from our digital relationships

Mining our digital relationships for insights that could lead to lucrative revenue streams — MIT, IBM and every company rushing to find a successful social media business model is looking into this. BusinessWeek takes a look at how companies are Learning, and Profiting, from Online Friendships.

A simple word cloud generator

Here’s a simple and fun new tool from IBM alphaWorks: Word Cloud Generator. Building on the Wordle technology, also created by Jonathan Feinberg, an engineer at the IBM Research Collaborative User Experience lab in Cambridge, MA, this tool lets you generate interesting (and pretty) word clouds based on a set of words. The lab is also responsible for previous visualization technologies on alphaWorks including Many Eyes and History Flow Visualization Application.

Debunking social media myths

Here’s a good summary from BusinessWeek Debunking Six Social Media Myths. While we probably already knew this to some degree, it’s all too easy to get caught up in the social media hype. The article touches on these myths:

1. Social media is cheap, if not free.
2. Anyone can do it.
3. You can make a big splash in a short time.
4. You can do it all in-house.
5. If you do something great, people will find it.
6. You can’t measure social media marketing results.

Tweeting the path to a Korean BBQ taco

How’s this for social media at work?  The latest twist on L.A. fusion is the Kogi Korean BBQ taco truck. Every night, the Kogi truck parks in a new location and its ardent followers find it via Twitter updates. Even for Angelenos who are used to excellent Korean and Mexican food, this has become a word-of-mouth sensation. There’s certainly no other place that I know of to get Korean BBQ on a taco. Hundreds are following the tweets, overtaking the hordes we’re used to seeing at Pink’s Hot Dogs. Still, it may be worth the wait (and signing up for Twitter) for this unique flavor excursion.

Web 2.0 growing pains

I’ve been noticing more commentary lately that it’s time for Web 2.0 to grow up. This may even be inevitable since the economic meltdown is forcing numerous companies, including startups, to take a hard look at their business plans. There are still a lot of people, especially in the social networking space, jumping in with yet-to-be-decided business models. As the first dotcom bust taught us, focusing on gathering users and worrying about how to survive later doesn’t really work.

In a way, the current economic climate may be a good thing. Just like the great dotcom bust, the current conditions will likely lead to a shakeup that wipes out a lot of ‘me too’ strategies, leaving serious companies with realistic business models standing.

Today, in an interview with publisher Tim O’Reilly in the Los Angeles Times, the creator of the Web 2.0 Expo talks about the next wave of Web 2.0 and argues that it’s time for young developers to get serious about the potential of technology, and move beyond the frivolity of much of social media apps. Wired also takes a look at the potential Web 2.0 shakeout and the areas that could be hit hardest. Expect to see a lot more coverage on this topic.

The ideal social network

Earlier this week, I presented my take on marketing with social media. One of the key elements in creating a strategy is building niche communities of users. There are two sides to that challenge — what it takes for a marketer to build a community, and what it takes for me as a user to want to participate in that community.

Sometimes I’m a reluctant participant. I may join a social network because friends or colleagues ask me, and then I quickly start to disengage. You’ve probably had that experience too and have discovered that unless there’s something very specific that you’re interested in, you’re not likely to stay in that community. And like me, you probably belong to a number of networks you’re not really participating in. So, with that in mind, what would be the ideal social network?

For me, today, it would probably be a combination of Facebook, Ning and maybe some features from LinkedIn and Friendfeed thrown in. The ideal social network would be a personal network of communities that I could weave together as I like, giving each a weight based on my engagement and interest. To be honest, I think many of us already do this on an ad hoc basis, with a wide range of standalone networks that remain like gated communities. We spend a lot of time and effort navigating between these networks.

For what I have in mind, Ning comes close in theory. By leveraging an open framework, it allows people to build and join multiple niche networks. However, while Ning allows you to ‘build a community for anything’ it doesn’t allow you to ‘build a community for everything’. The communities aren’t necessarily well connected nor integrated into a profile view.

Right now, nobody does that better than Facebook. Still, one of my hangups with Facebook (and a reason I don’t spend much time there anymore), is that my profile is viewed the same way by everyone on my friend list. You can’t isolate parts of your profile information to maintain, for example, a ‘business’ profile or a ‘family’ profile. Ideally, if you’re looking for work contacts, you should be able to create a profile that includes work experience, areas of expertise and business-related content — stuff that you might not want your friends to see.

Facebook ‘circles’ and ‘networks’ cover this functionality to a limited extent, but there’s much greater control we could potentially have over our information, which would allow us to facilitate multiple communities to participate in areas of interest and share this with friends who share the same interest — but through your own network. So segments within your own network could be part of larger networks formed around shared interests, but could also exist independently. In a technical sense, the nature of these networks would be ‘dynamic’ rather than defined. These myriad communities would be fluid and flow through you, the user. In that sense, it would be just like real life.

There are other things that could go into a wish list for the ideal social network. From experience, you’ve probably got a long list of features as well. To summarize, for me, it comes down to these key points:

Make it easy to join: Make it easy for people to join and share information between their networks and services. If they can use existing IDs, and possibly share content from other relevant services, they’re more likely to join a network.

Let users control participation: Let users decide what they want to share and with whom. Let users build an umbrella network of people and content, and then segment this network into communities of interest.

Provide and aggregate targeted content: Provide topics and content that are geared toward specific interests, and are surfaced so that users don’t have to wade through a lot of other topics to find them. The more targeted a community, the easier this will be. And the more likely users will have something to contribute.

Free Webinars on social media

If you haven’t already seen this, social media enthusiasts may be interested in the free Webinar series from the Silicon Valley Web Guild on Social Media Analytics Strategies, and an upcoming series on Leveraging Social Media for Business.

Marketing with social media

Social media is definitely hot these days. Lots of companies say they’re incorporating social media tools into their marketing practices. But what does that really mean? There’s a lot of advice out there but it’s still a little hard to make sense of it all. While it’s easy to cover the basics — like signing up for a Twitter account or setting up a group on a social networking site — a coherent and broad strategy is becoming crucial as both users and web technology become more sophisticated. Creating such a strategy is beyond the scope of a single blog post, but I wanted to share some thoughts about things to keep in mind. This is what it boils down to for me:

1. Build on marketing basics: It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of social media, to convince yourself you need it and that it’s right for you. While social media extends your marketing reach, you still have to remember the basics:

• Create effective messaging: i.e. What are you trying to communicate about your product or service? What are the benefits?
• Use multiple channels to get your message across.
• Promote a product or service you believe in.
• Understand your audience and why they are using it.
• Be patient.

2. Create niche communities: The most important aspect of social media today is still social networking. While you can capitalize on popular social networking or microblogging sites by setting up a “group” for your product or service, you can take the next step and build your own social network using an open framework like Ning. Large social networks cater to general users with very diverse needs and interests. Your message will likely get lost. As social networking matures, the strongest and largest communities will survive but there will also be a prevalence of niche networks popping up around the needs of specific communities.

By building your own dedicated community, you can create a clear message and attract people who are interested in your content. Once created, these networks can also evolve to meet the needs of your community. Of course, the potential danger with this is network fatigue — people tired of belonging to numerous networks — which brings me to my next point.

3. Recognize the role of aggregators: As niche social networks spring up to serve more communities, the ability of individual users to manage them is becoming more important. Hence the growing popularity of aggregation tools that allow users to push content to and from a variety of services, including social networks, blogs, Twitter, Flickr, RSS feeds, etc. A growing number of users are relying on these intermediary services to keep track of specific interests without being overwhelmed by having to visit multiple sites.

4. Keep it open: By using a standard like OpenID, you can remove the barrier of registration and make it easy for users to access your social network and experience content without having to create a new password and identity. No one has to sign up for your niche community — if they use OpenID, they already belong.

5. Implement low hanging fruit: There are ways to communicate with your users online that have existed since the earliest days of the internet, including forums, surveys and polls. There’s a tendency now to group these into what are known as social media collaboration tools (e.g. ratings, comments, recommending features). Regardless of the name, having these basic features on your site to rally interest and feedback about your product or service can be a first step in getting customers talking to each other and talking to you.

6. Not all social media is relevant: While there’s a lot of talk about technologies that allow collaboration and pooling of collective opinion and knowledge, not all of them may be relevant for your business or product. For example, prediction markets or crowdsourcing, which really build on age-old concepts of predictive analysis and polls, aren’t that relevant for marketing. For starters, the information is only as good as the diversity and size of the pool of participants. And while they can be an indicator of market interest, in most cases, it makes more sense to drive business strategy from inside out, and then leverage community participation at an early stage to gauge interest and alter the final offering. Additionally, wikis, blogs, link sharing, multimedia sharing and entertainment technologies may be popular with end-users, but you should discriminate based on your actual needs.

7. Create long-term strategies, short-term plans: Most aspects of social media are still evolving. The technology is improving all the time and communities of users are still testing their comfort levels with various tools and concepts. So while it’s important to create long-term strategies that are consistent with your overall business goals, it’s necessary to maintain flexible short-term plans for implementing a social media strategy and adjust continually. It needs to be an iterative process.

Blogging for dollars… how do they keep up!

I’m relieved that I don’t have to blog for dollars, especially after reading this article in Slate which talks about the pressures that bloggers face to “write what they know, and watch the dollars flow.”

For a few years, I was an editor of an emerging technology magazine in Canada, and though I wrote several articles a week — and felt the pressure too sometimes — it was nothing compared to what professional bloggers must feel, spinning yarns on the fly. What keeps them going? The adrenylyn rush? The promise of a fat paycheck? Or maybe just living the dream.

Social Media Strategies Conference

I know the folks at the Silicon Valley Web Guild and they happen to be putting together the Social Media Strategies Conference in San Francisco, October 29-30. They’ve got quite a line up of social media experts from Jive, Beeline Labs, Intuit, Microsoft and Intel participating in the event and it looks like the list is growing. If you’re wondering how to leverage social media, you’re a strategist, a marketer or a Web professional, this may be worth checking out.