Posts filed under 'social networking'
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August 28th, 2008, 09:18am
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An interesting little report came out of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research recently - a “statistically significant, longitudinal (study) on the usage of social media in corporations.” However, it wasn’t just any corporations - the study focused on the Inc. 500, which is comprised of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the U.S. One particularly interesting headline result - 39% of the Inc. 500 is blogging, which is a 20% increase over the previous year. In contrast, other research indicates only 11.6% of the Fortune 500 currently has “active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products“, a bump of 3.6% over the same time period. As the following chart shows, the Inc. 500 is also showing rapid growth in the adoption of social networking, online video, wikis, and podcasting:
It will be intriguing to see if the leadership of the private companies over public continues to persist, and/or whether the Inc. 500 adoption is a leading indicator of what the public companies are going to do. Wikinomics readers might also be interested in following the “In contrast” link above, which is a wiki page that was created by Chris Anderson and Ross Mayfield to enable a cooperative, volunteer effort to review the blogging activity of Fortune 500 companies. My favorite link here is the “spectrum of corporate social media“, which hopes to flush out a taxonomy of ways to engage in social media (with specific examples). I think it still has a long way to go, but here’s how it currently stands: Read More »
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August 27th, 2008, 01:51pm
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The combination of Ning and WidgetLaboratory (WL) was a story that had wikinomics written all over it. The former is a platform that enables anyone to create their own social networks focused on anything they want, and they actively encouraged individuals and companies to innovate on top of the platform and make it even better. WL did just that, and in a big way - they sold a number of widgets (for around $30 / month) tied to the Ning platform, supporting somewhere in the range of 2,000 networks and 1,000,000 individuals. WL was the most popular widget creator on the platform.
If I was writing this post a week ago, it probably would have been a feel good story about wikinomics, but the wheels have recently fallen off the proverbial bus. This is a development equally worthy of exploring in relation to the challenges that come with embracing wikinomics principles - and particularly those that emerge when you only embrace a few of them. Of greatest interest to me - if more stories keep popping up like this, it could be a dramatic blow to more open, collaborative innovation processes. That would be a shame.
TechCrunch picked up the story on August 22nd, when Ning suddenly removed all of the WL widgets, without warning to anyone, from their network. This decision which clearly angered the company, as well as the thousands of customers who had spent time and money with WL in order to optimize their offerings. Based on the emails that WL has published on the web, this is the gist of Ning’s complaint:
Over the past few months, WidgetLaboratory’s applications have caused multiple and significant technical degradations to the Ning Platform. In point of fact, your code has broken numerous times and has negatively affected a large number of Networks in addition to the Ning Platform.
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August 26th, 2008, 05:42pm
Editor’s Note: Brennan Direnfeld is a staff accountant working in Toronto. He blogs at Pathetically Awesome on topics such as exercising, books, accounting and other things he finds interesting on the Internet. Today he explores instances where companies used Web 2.0 as strategies themselves, instead as of tools best tailored to specific situations. An expanded version of this post can be read here.
Tools vs. Strategy
Web 2.0 and social networking are tools, they are not strategies. Companies need to realize that social networks are not Internet panaceas:
Networks work best under two conditions. First, they must allow people to make sincere connections with one another. Faking this sincerity can alienate users, reducing the value a social network can create. And second, they must adhere to the cultures already in place. This means you can’t take an existing corporate culture and shimmy it into any social network, as Blue Collar Comedy and Deloitte have learned: Read More »
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August 21st, 2008, 05:14pm
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One of the most hotly anticipated political news these days is Obama’s coming announcement of who he has picked as his Vice Presidential Nominee. But while most politicians would deliver such news-cycle-dominating stuff during a carefully choreographed photo-op, Obama has decided to do so by sending a mass text message to supporters.
Great (or annoying, depending on your opinion) marketing gimmick for getting people onto the campaign’s text message list, but even more exciting are the other ways in which that list is being used.
First off, Obama uses it to tell supporters the time and location of rallies close to where the live. For a political campaign, mobilizing supporters is a core competency. But it can be difficult to do, especially when events are spur-of-the-momment. Phones often ring unanswered, emails get snagged by spam and sit unread in mailboxes for days. Text messages are received and read pretty much instantaneously, and irrespective of where the recipient is. They are also more personal than a mass email or recorded telemessage, meaning its more likely people will pay attention to them, and much less resource-intensive than a person-to-person phone call.
Second, Obama texts his supporters policy updates. I know: BORING. That’s what I thought at first. But think about it. If McCain attacks Obama, Obama’s supporters know the rebuttal before they have even heard McCain’s attack. And, they’re going to be spreading that message to people they know. Conservative TV commentators have long been accused of reciting talking points sent to them straight from the Republican Party. Whatever your view of the ethics behind that, you must admit it is an effective way to get out the message. Replace those TV commentators (which generally attract audiences with median ages of over 60) with hundreds of thousands, even millions of ordinary people of every race and every class in every corner of the country, and you have a pretty big bull horn.
Meanwhile, John McCain has yet to use text messaging at all. And I don’t just mean his campaign, I mean him personally as well. LOL I can’t wait till November.
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August 11th, 2008, 07:46am
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Very observant readers may note that this post has some striking similarities to what I wrote about three months ago - the collaborative experience economy. What I tried to do then was connect the “four forms of theater” idea from Pine & Gilmore’s “The Experience Economy” with the principles of wikinomics - hence the name of the post. For whatever reason I didn’t get a lot of traction with it, but I’m still intrigued by the underlying ideas, so I wanted to re-frame the idea directly in relation to social media. More to the point, I’d like to hear from wikinomics readers as to whether it’s a useful framework for thinking about the use of social media in relation to creating experiences both for and with customers.
Read More »
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August 7th, 2008, 02:11pm
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Last week I spoke with Andrew Mottaz and Blake Johnson, the founders of Portland-based Site9, about their new software as a service offering: ProtoShare. ProtoShare allows web developers to collaboratively create interactive website prototypes, ensuring that everyone is on the same page during the development process. But more importantly, ProtoShare opens the process up to other stakeholder, such as the marketing team, allowing them to follow the project’s progress over time, and provide timely and effective feedback to developers. By improving communication and collaboration within the project team, and between them and their clients, ProtoShare has the potential to revolutionize the process of web design. Rather than write about it myself, I though I’d share the words of Andrew and Blake. With their permission, I have published an edited and abridged transcript of our conversation below.
WILL: To start off, why don’t you give us a bit of background about yourselves, your company, and both the process and motivation behind the development of ProtoShare?
ANDREW: Sure. We started Site9 back in 1998 as a web development company. We were always building tools to make ourselves more efficient, and we saw that a much bigger opportunity for us was to develop those tools into a platform we could sell. Our first product was Launch, which is an end–to-end web development solution. One of the aspects of Launch that customers really responded to was that it gave them the ability to create prototypes of websites: visual and interactive mock-ups that allowed the entire development team and their clients to have a common understanding of what the final product was going to be. And what we started to realize was that by taking that functionality, and enabling a greater level of collaboration within the development team and between developers and their clients—including those without technical experience—we could make something really powerful.
BLAKE: And with the advent of Web 2.0 technology and the whole architecture of collaboration and people working together online, we started thinking, “That’s how we enable collaboration.” You don’t just run your program on a server in someone’s company; you run it on the Internet where people anywhere in the world can participate in the project. You can have a team with people from all over the world working together.
WILL: What’s the advantage of a prototyping tool?
BLAKE: Everybody in web development should be prototyping. You want to move in an inverse pyramid, from abstract to concrete, working your way up. But a lot of people don’t prototype. And those that do, they often use things like Visio or Photoshop. So it’s flat. When you take that to a client—along with your big spec document—and say, “Here’s how it’s going to work. You’re going to go here. You’re going to here. You’re going to have this,” they all say, “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” And then, when the project is close to being done, they say, “I don’t like this.” And then you’ve got all this rework that could have been avoided if there had been more communication earlier on. So the advantage of a prototyping tool like ProtoShare is that it makes prototyping easier for developers, and provides the interactive and collaborative capabilities that get clients to engage with a prototype.
Read More »
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August 6th, 2008, 06:01pm
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If your dog doesn’t already have a Doggyspace account it may be missing out. This site was launched in mid July and already has a big following. According to the site “Doggyspace is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who love dogs. People use Doggyspace to keep up with friends, upload funny dog videos, and to give their dogs their own cyber place.”
It’s a novel idea… A place for dogs and their owners to connect and interact. I checked out the site, and to be honest it seemed very sparse. I’m a dog lover and I’m not opposed to getting JD (best dog ever) his own page, but the site didn’t seem to offer much. There are very few features or networking tools to speak of. There are a few pics and videos: They were all about as exciting as Tylenol PM.
The idea isn’t bad but it is likely that they are just trying to capitalize off the success Myspace and Facebook have achieved.
Take a look at the site and let me know what you think. Does your best pal spike need his own page?
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July 31st, 2008, 05:33pm
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If each person is their own brand, like my marketing professor says they are, then your online identity is a large, integral part of that brand. But how do you manage all of the content, yours or otherwise, that becomes attached to your name?
Take, for example, the other Brittany Creamer. She’s a blonde basketball player in a state several hundreds of miles north of the unathletic, brunette me. I was a little surprised, when logging in to Facebook one day a couple of years ago, to see pictures posted of me with blonde hair surrounded by foreign faces. Although quickly untagging these pictures resolved my mini identity crisis, how do you prevent and manage larger, more serious cases of mistaken identity?
Blogger Esther Dyson suggests the idea of curating your online identity in her blog in MIT’s Technology Review. She raises thought provoking questions about new complexities of personal identities that are less than private-say when your information is hosted on a platform or stored in a database. While she concluded that less vague and abstract user agreements and privacy settings are the quickest fix, I’m still a little skeptical. More specific user agreements could solve disputes about ads tailored to your interests, but I’m not sure how they could help manage user-generated content.
I use stringent limited profile settings on Facebook to prevent my colleagues from seeing my less-than-professional side. My work friends can’t see my wall (no offense!) because I can’t control what my friends post. With Facebook’s redesign, though, a person’s wall is now the page a viewer lands on when they click through to see that person’s profile. The content I created about myself is hidden in secondary tabs. So much for creating your own Facebook persona, now your friends do it for you. So what do my poor work friends see when they land on my new profile? My tight privacy settings now result in my profile looking like a barren desert. My solution? Well, I don’t have one yet. But I’m working on it.
My plan of last resort, should it come to that, will be to generate a fake identity and start all over. It only takes a click of the mouse.
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July 29th, 2008, 12:23am
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Many enterprises are eager to take their first steps with Web 2.0 technologies. However, many of our [nGenera Insight’s] clients have cited legal as a major barrier to implementing these new technologies.
It’s understandable that lawyers would be leery of these services. Because these technologies are new, they are often not well understood and have negative perceptions attached. When professionals hear the term social networking they automatically think of Facebook and university students posting pictures from wild parties. But if you look a little deeper, the enterprise benefits to these types of technology are obvious. Not only are they more efficient in many ways (see Anthony William’s previous post of Wiki collaboration leads to happiness) they also help reduce costs.
Read More »
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July 24th, 2008, 05:04pm
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Last night I left my red knapsack, with my white MacBook inside, in the back of a taxi cab. Needless to say, I’m a little upset. But the thing that is so frustrating about it isn’t the possibility that it might have been stolen (by another passenger, the driver, someone at the taxi cab company), its the possibility that it is, even now, in the hands of some kind soul who wants nothing more than to give it back to me, but has no way of knowing who I am. (I’ve been phoning the cab companies, but I’m not sure what company’s cab I was in.)
Of course, I knew there must be a web 2.0 solution to this problem. So I went surfing around. It turns out that 416-TAXICAB (a company that charges users to connect them to the first available cab company so they don’t have to put up with busy signals) runs the Toronto Taxi Lost-and-Found online notice board. Great idea. But from the looks of it, its only being used by people who have lost things, not those who have found them.
In other areas, however, the internet greatly improving on our traditional methods of lost and found. A few examples:
- When Matt Preprost found a lost camera, he decided to post the photos on the net. Within days he had not only returned the camera to its rightful owner, people from around the world were sending him photos from lost cameras they had found. IFoundYourCamera.net reunites people with their lost photographs, sometimes decades after they were taken.
- TheLostPets.com runs databases for lost dogs (FidoFinder.com) and lost cats (TabbyTracker.com). Those who have lost or found missing pets can post information (including a reward), and search through other entries.
- Pet Harbor allows users to search US and Canadian animal shelters for lost dogs and adoptable dogs, as well as post information about found dogs. This service is used by local governments, including the City of Toronto’s Animal Services Department and Sutter County, California.
Anyone got their own examples (or any info on my laptop!)?
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July 17th, 2008, 10:37am
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In the last 20 some odd years corporate security has made some headway. Companies are now at the point where they are reasonably efficient at keeping ‘hackers’ out and letting employees in. The problem is that to get to this point the enterprise has had to put up walls in the name of safety and security, but at the cost of functionality and logic.
The current Jericho model of security (fitting name) is great a putting up impermeable walls to keep to dangers outside at bay, but not so at quickly adapting and reconfiguring them. Even inside the walls of the enterprise security has largely been based on group permission. Which is just a step up from the one size fits all XXXL t-shirts that get blasted out of an air gun at sporting events.
The problem is that organizations today need to be agile, reconfigurable, be able to leverage partners and third party expertise. Unfortunately to operate in this new environment security and permissions need to be dynamic and flexible both internally and externally. To become a next generation enterprise it will be increasingly important to both empower and trust employees when it comes to information and security decisions. Read More »
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July 15th, 2008, 10:15am
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A little while ago I wrote a two-part series called “Looking into the blogosphere through a sporting lens” (part 2 is here). The purpose of the series was to look at some questions underlying a Costas Now program, which itself was supposed to be an insightful look at the role of the blogosphere in relation sports reporting. While the video itself devolved into something far less thoughtful then it could have been, the questions it raised about the role and value of comments in the blogosphere continue to be quite interesting to me.
What leads me to bring this up again is blatant self-promotion are two very interesting posts, with wildly divergent perspectives on the comments issue. The first is from social media expert Chris Brogan, entitled “Musicians play for tips - The importance of comments“. In the post Chris reminds readers that comments are important, presents his rough calculations on the percentage of readers who comment (roughly 1/4 of 1%), and admits that his own personal commenting habits are roughly in the same ballpark.
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July 12th, 2008, 05:14pm
Most of us use popular social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter for staying in touch with friends and meeting new people, but have you ever heard of someone using one of these sites to free someone from jail?
That’s exactly what happened here. A photographer, James Karl Buck, and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were jailed in Egypt back in April. Buck used his cell phone to post the message “Arrested” on Twitter. Within a day, his school hired an attourney, and Buck was released. However, his translator was detained for an additional 3 months. Buck again went to his Twitter network, now with over 570 followers, for help in getting his translator freed. Over 900 signed an online petition which was used to free Maree.
Whoever thought the power of Web 2.0 could have an impact like this? Web 2.0 enables people to get the word out about a certain issue or topic that needs exposure. My colleague Komail Mithani wrote an entry earlier this week on how Web 2.0 enables people to have their voices heard in regards to customer service issues.
Freeing people from jail via a social networking site or other Web 2.0 technology may not be something one can expect to increase in occurrence in the future but I do foresee more and more interesting and unique uses of Web 2.0. What are some ways you’ve used a Web 2.0 technology for a unique purpose or goal?
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July 10th, 2008, 12:01pm
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A friend of mine informed me that you can check out the new facebook profile layout early (but you need to install the developer application to see it) — it goes live on the 17th of this month. In case you don’t want to install the application to check it out for yourself, here’s a screenshot:
I would actually go so far as to say that the screenshot and cropping job that I did actually makes it look a lot better than it does in your browser. If you don’t check it out now, you’ll see it when it goes live in a couple of weeks. My concerns are chiefly that things aren’t where you’d expect that they are, and wherever you do find them, they’re ugly.
The issue is that this new design doesn’t agree with existing user habits, and therefore gets in the way of simply using the platform. There’s quote that says that technology is anything that doesn’t quite work yet, it seems that the current version of facebook simply worked in so many ways that it ceased to be technological and was just useful. My concern is that this new layout will push the platform back into the domain of technology for its users, resulting in much frustration and many loud complaints.
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July 7th, 2008, 10:28am
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We’ve posted several times about the Obama campaign. See here, here, here, and here.
Senator Obama and his team have done a really good job engaging with the electorate via LinkedIn. As of today, he has thousands of connections and has received more than 3000 responses to his question, “What ideas do you have to keep America competitive in the years ahead?”, many of which are very interesting and insightful. He’s also added a LinkedIn interest group.
One of the keys to success here, is that his LinkedIn profile is set up much like a “regular person” in tone and language — fitting in with his strategy of not appearing to be an old school Washington insider.
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July 3rd, 2008, 10:51am
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If we ever needed a greater example of social networking in the 21st century, then New Orleans would be the first place to look. After being destroyed being flooded on account of failed levies in the fallout of Hurricane Katrina, the “sixth-strongest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded and the third-strongest hurricane on record that made landfall in the United States,” New Orleans was in desperate need for aide and restructuring.
In an article by Network World, we learn about a non-profit organization called Think New Orleans where an underpaid programmer, Alan Gutierrez highlighted “how a crash course in social networking helped people emerge from the rubble; find their voice; fight the government; solicit help; and save their neighborhoods, schools and each other.” He explains that residents hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina used their creativity to use social media sites such as: Flickr, WordPress, Yahoo Groups, and Google Maps to increase rebuilding efforts “away from the wrecking balls swung by city government.” Read More »
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June 30th, 2008, 10:59am
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Facebook, as almost everyone knows, is a social networking site that has quickly emerged to be the market leader with the tag line “Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” Ning is a little less well known, but it is a platform co-founded by Mark Andreessen that allows anyone to “create your own social network for anything.” Almost any way you slice it, these two companies look like natural competitors, with very different approaches to the social networking space. In turn, it’s fairly interesting to hear that Marc Andreessen is poised to join the Board of Directors for Facebook- does anyone care to speculate as two what these two companies may be able to get up to together? I’ve personally heard a lot speculation (or perhaps I should call it postulation) about a future where each of us will have a single online identity point which links directly to our other points of presence on the web - could this be a step in that direction?
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June 28th, 2008, 11:02am
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Jive software has released a product called Clearspace – an enterprise collaboration tool with social networking, wiki and blogging capabilities. Jive has gotten some great reviews on Clearspace, suggesting that it’s easy to use and intuitive. Clearspace is making some headway breaking down the negative perceptions associated with terms like social networking or blogs, and helping to bring collaborative web technologies to the enterprise. The first thing that comes to peoples’ minds when they hear the words ’social network’ is Facebook – the place where kids post pictures from keggers or write in their online diaries – but if you look a little deeper there are some clear enterprise benefits associated with these technologies which is probably why Jive is boasting a strong list of 2,000 customers, including impressive names like Dell, Intel, Nike, Deloitte and Oracle.
Clearspace’s social networking function offers detailed profiles of your co-workers as well as a ‘mini-feed’ to keep users updated on what their colleagues are working on. Its wiki platform helps deal with long chain e-mail responses, speaking to the ‘wiki happiness’ diagram that Anthony Williams pointed us to in one of his previous posts. Clearspace’s blogging capability lets employees express their interests, opinions and talk about areas within their expertise. Most importantly – all of this is searchable.
A Forbes article featuring Jive points to a blind-test of several collaboration options, including Clearspace and SharePoint (the dominant enterprise collaboration suite, created by Microsoft). “People voted unanimously for Clearspace and were so won over they made bumper stickers that said ‘Friends don’t let friends use SharePoint.’”
Jive understands its competitive environment and sees the need to adapt its strategy to the demands and restrictions of the market since it is up against heavyweights like Microsoft (Sharepoint has over 100 million licenses sold since 2001). In an interview with CIO magazine, Jive’s CEO Dave Hersh points out that around 80% of their customers have SharePoint.
Although Sharepoint is good at work flows and files, it’s not as good with working with web content and online collaboration. To compete with companies like Microsoft, Jive has developed Clearspace to be extensible (understanding that it would be near impossible to convert all of Sharepoint’s established customers): it has the ability to integrate with Sharepoint while Jives’ discussion forum software is bundled into Oracle and SAP’s portal applications.
For more articles highlighting jive and clearspace go to their news section.
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June 26th, 2008, 03:45pm
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We often poke fun at our friends at the Province of Ontario for their decision to ban Facebook usage by employees. The decision, taken back in May of 2007, was justified as it was “determined it (Facebook) was not as directly related to the workplace as we’d like it to be so we’re restricting access to it.”
Now I’m going to put aside my usual remarks about management, motivation and ultimately its value as a recruiting tool (if you trust and value your current employees, wouldn’t their close ties be prime targets for recruitment?), and instead point you towards some interesting survey results out of the UK. Courtesy of Telindus, a Belgian IT Services firm, and via Rialtas.net, an Irish e-government & e-democracy blog that I follow:
“The survey found that 39 per cent of 18 to 24 year-olds would consider leaving if they were not allowed to access applications like Facebook and YouTube. A further 21 per cent indicated that they would feel ‘annoyed’ by such a ban. The problem is less acute with 25 to 65 year-olds, of whom just 16 per cent would consider leaving and 13 per cent would be annoyed.”
So would you actually consider leaving your job if they banned access to social networking sites? And on the flip side, if you’re one of the organizations banning these tools for your employees, how do you justify doing so?
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June 26th, 2008, 09:43am
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A survey published by the Rasmussen Reports, “an electronic publishing firm specializing in the collection, publication, and distribution of public opinion polling information,” found that 49% of Americans believe that the federal government should regulate the Internet the same way as radio and television.
This was in response to a Missouri woman pleading “not guilty to charges in an Internet hoax blamed for a 13-year-old girl’s suicide.” Lori Drew, a 49-year old mother, allegedly created a fake Myspace account “to send cruel messages to a 13-year-old neighbor Megan Meier, a friend of Drew’s daughter, including one stating the world would be better off without her.” Meier committed suicide after these messages were received. You can read about the incident here.
With huge talks about Internet piracy it seems that Internet harassment is an issue we haven’t discussed. According to the survey, 73% of Americas believe that it is a crime to harass someone over the Internet. So what will the impact of this trial lead. I believe their will be substantial consequences to this trial because:
1) This is the first federal charge involving the well-known social networking website, Myspace.com, and
2) The decision of this trial will push law makers to address the issue of Internet harassment on not just a local level, but a national one
Now, I know that this is my second post about security (my first one covered internet infrastructure in Estonia but I believe it should be spread across the blogosphere. How can a parent sink so low to use a social networking site teens use to express themselves to emotionally hurt one of her daughter’s friends? If Ms. Drew is convicted it will be interesting to see what implications this decision will have. I will keep a close eye on this trial to see the final verdict. This just shows the Web 2.0 has evolved parenting. It appears that cyber-bullying is starting to get more attention and will soon raise concerns among parents.
So do you think the government should step up and pass policies to stop Internet harassment and cyber-bullying? How should social networking websites such as Myspace and Facebook address this issue?
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