Will you be attending Community 2.0?

If you're planning on attending, speaking or sponsoring in San Francisco May 11-13 for Community 2.0, we invite you to add Community 2.0 to your Events on LinkedIn. Join us here: http://events.linkedin.com/pub/30308

Marketo gets new social networking service

Marketo, the market automation leader, has opened up a new online community to better service its market. The social network, Success.Marketo.com, allows access to product documentation, quick start guides, best practices, and communication between Marketo's customers and partners.

Phil Fernandez, president and CEO at Marketo, had this to say about the new online community:
"Our new social customer success community is yet another example of our innovation in all aspects of the customer experience. The community portal not only provides 24x7 support and best practices information, but also provides a forum for ongoing communication between Marketo, our growing user base, and our partners. Today's customers are no longer satisfied with static support solutions, and our new community-based portal is a great way for customers to get and share all the information they need to be successful."

Source: MSNBC

Is AOL Selling Bebo?

Mike Butcher has the scoop on a possible fire sale of Bebo by AOL. AOL acquired Bebo only a year ago and its reported that the AOL execs aren't too happy with the performance of this social networking site. According to Butcher's article, the problem lies mostly with advertisers. As Bebo competes with Facebook and MySpace, advertisers are looking to explore more eyeballs through revenue on the more popular sites. Of course this info is speculation but Butcher has enough solid sources for us to keep a watch out on AOL. Read the article here and let us know what you think.

How to Increase your Twitter Followers

I came across this guest post on TechCrunch from Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and cofounder of Revision 3, in which he highlights 10 ways to increase your twitter followers. After all, Kevin is the 2nd most followed person on twitter with 88,000 followers, only second to President Obama! Here are his tips:

1. Encourage your followers to retweet your links.
2. Fill out the bio section on your page, people want to know you.
3. Put links to your twitter profile everywhere on the web.
4. Tweet about things that you are passionate about, and #hash tag them.
5. Broadcast your twitter account in the physical world, ex: business cards, presentations, podcasts, etc.
6. Take lots of pictures because they are heavily tweeted and retweeted.
7. Start contests to get you in the number one spot.
8. Follow top twitter users and see what they tweet about, this can give you some ideas.
9. Reply to/get involved in #hash tag memes.
10. Track your results to see how well your profile has grown.

Enjoy!

College admissions and social media

A study was recently published about the use of social media in college admissions offices. An astounding 41% of admissions offices in US colleges and universities have blogs. This is considerably more than the 13% of Fortune 500 companies who are currently blogging. Universities are also integrating social media into admissions, as they do research the students, 23% of universities using search engines and 17% using social networks. Click here to view the full report presented by UMass Dartmouth.

Adults Taking Over Social Networking Sites

The Social Media Club of Salt Lake City was featured in KSL.com amid new reported research that adults were taking over social networking sites. No surprise to any community 2.0 member. With the growth of such inter generational social networking sites, i.e., Facebook and LinkedIn, more adults have found that connecting with their friends online is beneficial in private and professional matters. Again no surprise. If you're in the Salt Lake area, check out this club and let us know what they're discovering and learning. We'd love to hear more.

Read the January Community 2.0 Roundup

Here’s your chance to view our monthly newsletter that we send out to our Community 2.0 LinkedIn group with the latest updates in social media and online communities. Remember, to join our Commnunity 2.0 LinkedIn group and update your email addresses on LinkedIn in order to receive it on an ongoing basis. Enjoy!

http://www.iirusa.com/upload/wysiwyg/Community2.0_January_Newsletter.html

Agriculture starts to understand social media

Michele Payn-Knoper has set out to help the agriculture community of America embrace and understand social media. She is now conducting web seminars to help those involved in agriculture fully understand how to integrate themselves into social media to help protect the reputation of American agriculture.

She talks in-depth about it in this podcast.

Source: Brownfield

Enterprise Customer Communities: Hot Topics for 2009

Today we have a guest post from Community 2.0 speaker Joe Cothrel. He is Chief Community Officer at Lithium Technologies, which powers some of the largest enterprise communities on the web. He’ll be speaking at Community 2.0 on five key trends in customer communities. Today he shares some of his insights with us.

* * * * *
What lies ahead for enterprise customer communities in 2009? I’ve spent the last eight weeks talking to our customers about their plans for the new year, and here are the common themes:

Return: The economic downtown didn’t create the need for return on investment from communities, but it has certainly made the need more urgent. Few companies are abandoning their hard-to-ROI efforts, but every company I spoke to talked about the need to quantify what can be quantified – and to justify any new spend with projected cost savings or revenue increases.

Success: The days of a “success neutral” approach to social media or community will end this year. Companies are asking for ways to measure success – not just in dollars, but in the breadth and depth of impact to their customer base. What that means is that engaging a hundred or a thousand people out of a customer base of thousands or millions won’t be enough. Good benchmarks will be important to this effort.

Integration: Today, social media efforts are often siloed in different locations on company websites. Customers are asked to register once to comment on a blog, again to submit an idea, and again to participate on a forum. Needless to say, these databases are rarely integrated with a customer database that contains transaction data, or prospect databases that track leads. Single sign-on (SSO) efforts abound – those that don’t have them will get them this year.

Flexibility: Companies want more control over how the social media efforts on their web sites are presented to customers. More companies are talking about using APIs to create an experience for users that is distinctive and more “Web 2.0.” Yet there is little awareness of the impact these changes will have on participation, conversion, and customer satisfaction. Look for companies who don’t get good guidance to “take some lumps” in 2009 in this area (not our customers, of course!).

Enthusiasm: In 2008, more than 70% of our customers had community efforts that were two years old or less – which is probably representative of enterprise communities in general. But the number of companies entering the “mature” phase of their community efforts grows every year. These communities have a different set of problems and opportunities than young communities. Flattening growth curves make it harder to assess community health, so new ways of measuring them are needed. On the opportunity side, internal stakeholders are looking at mature communities and asking “what’s next?” One big trend is taking well-functioning support forums and moving them up the curve toward greater enthusiasm and engagement. We’ll hear more about “superusers,” “enthusiasts,” and “Influencers” this year as a result.

Every company has a host of other priorities this year, but those are the themes that unite them. I’m looking forward to sharing more on these topics in my presentation at Community 2.0 in May. See you then!

Interesting ways to use the collaborative web

In the more recent years, the web has reclaimed its nature of being collaborative- the way it was meant to be in the first place.

There are collaboration tools galore- some that have achieved fame as the collective noun- “social network”. Some others including the social network form what has come to be known as the “social media”

Wait. Before you think this going to be a shpeel on social media and its importance (It IS important though) let me declare otherwise now.

What I do want to highlight though, is the fact that today the web is full of collaborative tools that could be used by businesses in a variety of ways- some that encourage connect-ability and yet others that thrive on rationalizing the wisdom of crowds.

There are comparison and review sites that attempt to give rational advice- say on specifications and even price points. And then there are blogs and other engagement tools that people so freely use to express, discuss and activate about a subject. Not only this, the collaborative web today can even get inside the mind of people- when people speak their minds in the high reach and safe anonymity of the web.

The great things about these tools is that they can be manipulated by companies in a myriad of ways to not only to connect and collaborate, but also listen to what the market is saying about them. It can help them get some of those elusive customer insights for which they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and still feel, well…somewhat blank.

To establish context, I showcased one such popular tool- called BrandTags on chasingthestorm.com recently. It is a collaborative experiment to assess people’s perception of brands- what’s the first thing that comes to their mind when they think of the brand. Something that the ad guys are quite used to doing while planning communication strategies (unaided recall or brand personification type studies)

To show that it can be used a little beyond frivolous interpretation (though it has quite a following), I conducted a basic perception audit. I chose some top computer brands and analyzed the outputs from the tool.

I plotted top 30 tags that the crowds cumulatively attributed to the brand and divided them into positive, negative and neutral mentions. The ones that referred to a brand name or a product were categorized neutral. Ones with positive or negative connotations were then labelled similarly. It was not as easy as it sounded though- how do you classify “cheap” for example? And how do you classify “India” or “China” as tags? Remember these are largely ‘western’ perspectives (I classified countries as neutral though).

When I published the first post, I wanted micro analysis done. I had many brands and models in the consideration set- but soon realized that (A) the tool was not meant to be micro enough to give model specific response (B) Fewer (top) brands analysis will do just fine- to showcase the kind of inferences that could be drawn.

Now, as you read the analysis post, you will realize that the insights are far from scientific and do not offer detailed insights. But the fact is- when you use more such tools together, it is then that they have the potential to deliver more insights. A simple example could be combining this tool with a tool that collates Net Promoter Score- leveraging the Crowd wisdom.

I also mention that listening and leveraging the collaborative tools can help brands develop engagement strategies best suited to engage their stakeholders.

See the analysis of brands like HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer and Apple. Some astonishing results and some others that you’d probably be expecting anyways. Tell me what you think about them. What are the other ways in which this can be used? Any other similar tools that you have come across? I’d love to know, experiment and spread.
Happy New Year to all readers.

Social media diary 16/1/2009 - London 2012

Image via Wikipedia

London announces social media strategy for 2012 Olympic Games

This week came the first announcements of the social media strategy that will accompany London's 2012 Olympic Games. The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) will work with the sponsors of the Games to launch a social media campaign in the run-up to the games in three years time as part of it's campaign to get younger people to get involved in both the Games and sport more generally.

They are currently negotiating the involvement of the various official sponsors, and Adidas will be the first to launch a project as part of the campaign. Their involvement will include what is called an "online sports activation project", a set of online social media activities, and presence in social networks, that will sit alongside a campaign offering free gyms to London schools and communities.

According to Alex Balfour, head of new media at LOCOG:

"The main driver for it will be around social values. It will be focused less on the people who are already active in sport or aspire to be lead sports people and more on those who have some interest but don't see the social rewards in it."

So what can we learn from this?

The announcements to date seem to be focusing on ways to engage younger audiences, through online communities and social networks. They appear to be building social media elements into their broader projects to encourage mass participation in sport and hope that this will help their drive to get young people involved.

This is undoubtedly a laudable effort. It is great to use the focus that the Olympic games provide to encourage and promote sport; and especially to motivate younger people to get involved. Social media undoubtedly has a significant role to play in any activities like this and I look forward to what I hope are well-planned and well-executed activities online. The Olympics is a big deal, and it deserves great and innovative use of social media.

Of course, I really hope that London 2012's social media strategy goes much further than what we have seen announced so far. Whilst it is great to try to engage young people in this way, I hope they will try to engage the rest of us too! As we wrote earlier this year, the Olympics should be the perfect social media event. As we wrote at the time:

...if there were ever a perfect candidate for coverage in social networks, online communities and social media, then the Olympics surely must be it.

From my experience with clients, the aspects that are common in successful online communities typically include:

1. A shared or common interest or goal
2. The subject may be broad but allows interest groups to form
3. A subject people are or can be passionate about
4. Enthusiasts and leaders who will help to shape the community
5. An experience that is or can be inherently social, that people want to share with others
6. A subject that can create strong opinions and passionate views
7. Regularly changing and updated content
8. Media and varying content types so different people can interact in different ways
9. You can be more interested in the issues as you are in the people you are discussing them with
10. An ability for the online experience to be supplemented with offline experience

A full social media strategy should look at ways to engage and involve people before, during and after the Olympic games. If Beijing this year was the first time people have been able to use social media to report on events, London in three years' time should be the first games to fully integrate social media into the Olympic experience. That's why I'm looking forward to watching LOCOG's social media strategy develop and to more elements of it being revealed. By 2012, social media will use tools we don't even have yet in ways we can't imagine. I hope London is ready to make the most of them.

From the FreshNetworks Blog

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rmbrME/beamME: A Innovative Way to Share Your Contact Information

rmbrME/beamME is a social networking tool that's sole purpose is to "beam" your contact information to anyone using a portable device, ideally a smart phone. This effort will aim to replace the traditional business card and aid in "green" corporate communication.
After a quick sign up process and nominal fee, you can rent your own txtme name. For example, John Smith could be contacted by "get John Smith" to rmbrme. John's contact information would be sent directly to your phone and, if applicable, his vcard could be downloaded on your mail server. The service is hoping to expand their reach by releasing an iPhone application, that makes the process even smoother.

Do you think we'll see a wave of services like this? Post here or on our LinkedIn group.

Community 2.0 Speaker Profile: Joe Trippi

With the Community 2.0 event coming up in May, we're going to take the few months before that to introduce you to our keynote speakers for this year's event. Twice a month, we'll share with you one of our featured key note speakers. Community 2.0 is May 11-13 in San Fransisco, California at The Palace Hotel. This week, we're featuring keynote speaker Joe Trippi, the mastermind Barack Obama's social media campaign.

Joe Trippi's career in campaign management began in 1980 when he ran Edward M. Kennedy's presidential campaign. Throughout the years, he has been behind many famous campaigns, including Barack Obama and Tony Blair's re-election to British Prime Minister.

In 2004, he ran Howard Dean's presidential campaign, and was credited for using the internet innovatively to collect small donor fund raising. With that campaign, he collected more than any democratic national campaign, with most of the contributions amounting to less than $100 each.

Read here to find out more about Obama's internet and social media campaign. Hear his interview with the National Journal here.

Sources:
Joe Trippi's blog
Twitter
Trippi Media

A Conversation with Joe Trippi

The value of online sharing services

Gary Eckstein recently posted on Social Media Today about the value that social bookmarking can provide to website owners. They look at sharing services, like Digg, which allows viewers to vote on what they found interesting. Bookmarking services allow bookmarking of individual web pages, but a web based bookmarking program allows anyone to access the bookmarks across the web.

Eckstein offers these advantages to these two services:

1. Links: Every time someone shares or bookmarks a web page an additional link to the shared/bookmarked page is created. These links are indexed by the search engines (e.g. Google and Yahoo). It is common knowledge that search ranking is weighted heavily by the number of links to every web page i.e. the more links the more ‘important’ the search engines deem the page.

2. Expanded Audience: Sharing and bookmarking services (especially sharing services) list the pages submitted to the services. Anyone visiting and searching the sharing (or bookmarking) service may be presented with a link to the original content. This translates into a greatly expanded potential audience.

Do you frequently participate in a social bookmarking service? Have you seen it increase the amount of traffic you have visiting your website?

New Report: Forrester Wave Report: The Leaders in Community Platforms for Marketers (Part 4/4)

The new Forrester Wave Report is out and we encourage you to check it out. Follow this link to learn more!

Check out their findings on:

• Communities are a powerful way for businesses to grow
• What you must do before you select a vendor
• Over 100 vendors in this commodity market
• Therefore brands seek solution partners–not technologists
• Key findings of the 9 vendors
• Customize the Wave report to your business needs

Forrester Wave Report

Social media diary 9/1/2009 - Skype

Sony crowd-sources name for new online community

Sony this week launched a beta version of it's new online community this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The site combines company blogs with videos, photos and polls as well as allowing users to create profiles; it's a site for users to engage with Sony as a brand and as a company. They're using the site at the Show both to report on product launches but also to allow people to engage with their bloggers and content. From the perspective of launching an online community, many of the usual criteria appear to be met. The community is missing just one thing: a name.

Sony are looking to co-create the name for their online community, working with those people who are first to use and try the site both to get feedback on the content and the interactions, but also to suggest a name for the community. As their chief blogger and senior vice president of corporate communications, Rick Clancy, says:

We want to get feedback from users and also we thought it would be great to reach out to users for suggestions on a name for the site. My favorite so far is 'Sony No Baloney,' which I used for the very first blog post, but some of my colleagues disagree. Hopefully, the community members themselves can suggest something more clever.

So what can we learn from this?

There are many things right about how Sony are launching their online community. Getting the strategy and launch right can really help to maximise the chances of success, including:

• seeding the community with content and members even before the beta launch
• bringing together the ways the company interacts - making the user experience simple and not making them do work to find out where to interact
• launching alongside an event - capitalising upon the PR the event will bring and also establishing the clear relationship between the online and offline community of consumers - they are the same people after all, just engaging in different ways
• using the first members to help you finalise and develop the community

By working with these first members to co-create the name for the online community itself, Sony is allowing them to have real input into a significant part of the community member experience - what the community is actually called. There are many ways to engage community members and confer a feeling of ownership of the community too them, but I particularly like the idea of getting them to name the site. Naming conventions in society are important - those who help to name something feel ownership of and responsibility for it. By getting these first community members to work together to name the site they will create a set of people who feel responsibility for the success of the site and who want to work to make it a success.

Understanding the social dynamics at play in online communities is important, and if you capitalise upon them you can really help maximise the potential for success at launch and whilst you grow and develop your site.

From the FreshNetworks Blog

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The use of online communities for different purposes

In a recent article at the Huffington Post, Jared Cohen gave his opinion on a new hot topic: terrorists and how they use social media to congregate. Terrorists use the internet to congregate just as everyone else does on a daily basis. The new reality we face is that the digital space we all use is just an extension of everyday life, everyone's daily life. It is a new set of tools that we use to capitalize on our liberties given to us by governments.

He spends the majority of the article focusing on how they these tools were used to recruit for and plan the Mumbai attacks. Terrorists are using social media to their advantage, but is this any different from how they use NGOs and other fundraisers for aiding their attacks? Yes, they use these tools. But so do we, and in effect better, because the majority of operations can be focused into one social networking tool. They must spread their efforts across multiple platforms such as email, chat rooms and social communities, so they don't raise any red flags during the planning stages.

Social media may be yet another threat used by the terrorists to congregate and communicate, but it's a far greater advantage for those who are using it for other purposes. We can also monitor what's going on online, and see how the terrorists are using the online tools.

What is the Future of Social Media?

Jim Tobin over at Ignite Social Media posted 5 trends to look for in the future of Social Media. His focus is exclusively on corporate social media marketing and the list provides a neat insight into where the industry is headed in seemingly uncertain times. I am particularly fascinated with his prediction that we'll see fewer "Shiny New Tools." Marketers and corporations are working with less and its important to not be sidetracked by something new that may not prove to be an alternative to tried and true applications. Check out his list and think about your own list. What do you see happening in 2009? Post your comments and share with us on LinkedIn.

Join Us on Friend Connect

Yesterday we posted about the benefits of implementing Google's new social networking tool called Friend Connect. We've finally added this new feature to our site, so take a second to join the community and interact with the followers of this blog. Enjoy!

Google's Friend Connect

Joel Burslem recently took a look at Google's new social networking tool, Friend Connect. It's a way to add a social networking feature to your website that will allow people to connect on your website while using a pre-existing account to avoid social networking fatigue.

Through this tool, readers can join and see the profiles of other users also following the blog. It's a great way for your readers to build word of mouth marketing and drive traffic for you. It also allows users to post reviews of your blog.

Have you had a chance to add this feature to your site? What results have you seen?

A community to help you keep your New Years resolution

I Am the Solution is a new social networking site for the New Year. Sponsored by Family First, a non profit organization that focuses on family services, this online community encourages you to create a New Years resolution that is selfless, such as volunteering, giving money, or acknowledging a personal need, and through your online profile, you're held accountable for maintaining your resolution. Family First will highlight individuals who stick to their resolutions throughout the year. For more information, read here.