Social Ads- a First Take
When I read this post by Shiv Singh about Avenue A / Razorfish offering social ads (ads with social elements to them, like comments), I groaned. That was my very first take. And then I read the post a bit more closely.
Here’s the premise that I believe Shiv’s saying they’re going to try: there’s an ad, but then your “friends” can comment on the ad, or rate it, etc.
First off, I don’t know that this will work. If you post a Ford ad, and I come along and crap all over Ford in the comments for the ad, what will Ford, the site, or the ad platform do next? It would be NICE if we could have both sides of the conversation, but as ballsy as I want companies to be, I can’t see anyone taking that bet.
Second, it’s kind of interesting that I might be able to click an ad and get the metaconversation, but I’m curious whether I’d click in the first place, because that’s saying I’ve chosen to endorse the interruption. It continues the premise that people milling about in some online space want the distraction of an ad.
I’m going to think more about what would work for me in the space of “social” ads. My immediate thought is that affiliate marketing is kind of like that. But I have to consider it a bit more.
What do you think about all this?
Photo credit, Montrasio International
Internship Ratings- Interns Rate Back
Boston notable and young entrepreneur Stephanie Gurtman wrote me to let me know that she’s launched Internship Ratings, a place where interns can rate their experience as interns at various area businesses. According to the website, this is an east coast launch, but the concept is easy to spread across the country, so I imagine as interns discover it, the ratings might spread. One person who might want to check this out is Lauren Berger, the Intern Queen. Maybe Stephanie and Lauren will find some synergies.
I’m back and forth on rating sites. I think that they offer some value, but I always wonder about traffic. I’ve been looking back and forth at Vendor City in the same way for the last several days (a few months?), too.
To the plus side, it’s great that people have a place to rate and have a voice. My big concern: traffic. How do you get people there, and sustain the interest?
For now, I wish Stephanie luck, and as of this posting, here’s the Top 5 Places to Intern, according to her site:
What’s your take?
How Jive Software Sees Enterprises and Community Software
I had a chance to talk with Sam Lawrence, CMO of Jive Software about what’s coming out in his 2.5 release of Clearspace, Jive’s enterprise community software platform. (Note, we use the 2.0.x version of Clearspace to power Project Dogfood). There are a bunch of features that will no doubt get covered everywhere but very capable people. What I wanted to talk about was some of what came out in the conversation with Sam.
How Social Software Merges with the Enterprise
First, it has to integrate with the tools they understand. Sam showed me how Clearspace integrates with Salesforce.com, for instance. This was interesting. Because now, if I’m a sales guy and I’m getting ready to call one of my prospects or clients, I’ll get anything said anywhere within the Clearspace product about that company or prospect as information before I make the call.
If you’re a social software provider, or someone looking to advise companies on social software, think about this kind of usage: merging what Mzinga’s Rachel Happe calls “unstructured data” in with a typical contact record.
Easy and Easier Still
Sam mentioned that Clearspace has an email in and out feature, that allows mobile users and others to get information in and out of the platform simply, and through nothing more than an email interface (for instance). It should be easy to use a community platform, and it shouldn’t always require a full web browser. Most enterprise customers aren’t using iPhones.
Customization and Less Heavy IT Department Lifting
Lots of the changes in 2.5 might seem a bit aesthetic at first, but think about it: If you are building a social software platform and it is to be supported internally, you’ll want something that allows people to change and fiddle with most of it without a lot of effort required from IT. Why? Because they have other, bigger fish to fry. I like this as a trend, and I hope other platform providers continue to make things easily customizable, and yet not especially difficult to manage.
Further Integration
We have to stop thinking of social software as an island. It’s going to be part of the fabric, and that requires integration points, connectivity to the way people create business processes, and flexible enough to fit within an organization’s existing business styles. I saw lots of that in Jive’s latest release, and Sam talked about the company’s further efforts in that department for future visions.
Takeaways
I believe social software has a good opportunity to find its way into the enterprise in a much bigger way. There are other great companies doing this kind of thing as well. I’m excited by what I see from my friends at Mzinga, Telligent, and other platforms working in the enterprise software space.
For the rest of you looking to take your products to an even larger audience, especially if you’re hoping to become part of the way business is done, I think the future comes only once we give people adequate bridges forward from the present.
Here’s a video Jive made of their product, if you want more details:
Clearspace 2.5 from Jive Software on Vimeo.
50 Online Applications and Sites to Consider
For those of you already pretty much deep into social media applications, skip ahead and blaze through the list. If I’ve found five sites/applications that you haven’t seen or considered, leave a comment and give me a point. For the rest of you, here’s a list I put together the other day when thinking about just how much of my computer use is spent online and attached to the web. Some of the applications I point out aren’t things I use currently, but I have used them, and/or have an account there.
For those of you who are getting involved in social media a little bit at a time, consider this a list of things you might check out a little bit at a time to see what appeals, what fits into your workflow, and what you can dismiss as unnecessary for your needs.
AND, if you have some resources you think would be good to add to the list, feel free to add them in the comments section.
50 Online Applications and Sites to Consider
- Blogger - free blogging and hosting.
- Movable Type - paid software, needs host.
- TypePad - paid blogging and hosting.
- WordPress.com - free blogging and hosting.
- WordPress.org - free blog software, needs host.
- Tumblr - free blogging and hosting.
Microblogging
- BrightKite - microblogging, mobile, location.
- FriendFeed - microblogging/ aggregator.
- Identi.ca - open source microblogging.
- Jaiku - microblogging, mobile too.
- Posterous - microblogging, and/or sends to other sites.
- Pownce - microblogging and file sharing.
- Plurk - microblogging and threaded conversations.
- Seesmic - video microblogging.
- Twitter - microblogging and mobile.
- Utterz - microblogging, mobile, video.
Social Bookmarking
- Delicious - bookmarking.
- Ma.gnolia - enhanced bookmarking.
- Sphinn - bookmarking/voting.
- StumbleUpon - bookmarking and browsing.
Social News Sites
- Digg - social news.
- Mixx - social news.
- Reddit - social news.
Social Networks
- Facebook - general networking.
- Flickr - photo and video sharing.
- Last.fm - music sharing.
- LibraryThing - book lovers.
- LinkedIn - professional social networking.
- MySpace - general networking.
- Ning - white label social network.
- Pandora - music sharing.
- Yelp - rating restaurants and businesses.
Miscellaneous and Useful
- Twitter Search (formerly Summize) - search for what matters to YOU.
- Picnik - free online photo editing. Good for avatar pic touchups.
- Evernote - online and desktop note syncing/storage.
- Upcoming.org - event sharing site (great for finding cool conferences).
- Netvibes - web start page (has Ginger social features now, too).
- Twingly - blog search.
- Compete - web ranking analysis.
- AideRSS - rates your blog posts.
- Skitch - screen capture tool (mac).
Video Platforms
- Blip.tv - video hosting, sharing.
- Google Video - video hosting, sharing.
- Viddler - video hosting, sharing.
- Vimeo - video hosting, sharing.
- YouTube - video hosting, sharing.
- Mogulus - live video platform.
- uStream.tv - live video platform.
- BlogTV - live video platform.
- ooVoo - live video chat.
Blogging
Photo credit, klynsis
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Are You Living Consciously Online
We spend a lot of time online these days, and for some of us, our passion for social media and social networking has us digging deep into all kinds of new services, tending our various social farms, and performing lots of maintenance on all we’ve built. We add on top of this our content creation, our content consumption, and the other ways we use the Web, and then on top of that our other online communications channels like IM, Skype, and Utterz. Add to this our gaming, and how many hours are we consuming?
Today, I’m thinking about the various ways in which I spend my time on the web, asking myself how they align with my business and social interests, and wondering what I might be doing out of habit versus that which might be part of a plan. I’m considering how my contributions to social platforms matter, and thinking about ways that I can do good work for others.
How are you spending your time online? Are you making a difference? How much of what you do is according to a plan of some sort? Or is the web just a relief valve?
IBM Builds LOTS of Social Apps
My friend Luke sent me this BusinessWeek article about enterprise social network tools. There’s lots here.
First, take away from this that the social network technologies you know about in the consumer space are being rebuilt inside the firewall for business. Why? Those apps are perfect for business, because they do a better job of communicating information the way humans figure it out.
Second, understand that there are people looking for more from their social applications than food fight and super fun wall. If you’re developing, consider what might make for good business applications.
Third, bear in mind that what you might be doing for fun and leisure right now on the social networks might give you an edge on using collaborative technologies in upcoming months. It might just be the thing you’re doing at work, and not just the thing you’re doing at home.
What do you think about all this?
Jumping Over a Mountain
I believe this with all my heart: the way these new tools make the web work for us will (is!) dramatically impact the how/why/when of business communications and collaboration of all kinds. In ways, this impact is not too far afield from what Thomas Friedman talked about in THE WORLD IS FLAT. In this book, we learned how to move things that added value to our organization closer to the core of what we do, and how to disaggregate those things that aren’t as important and push those out to the fringe. It’s never safe to predict the future, but I want you to think about this, and see if it resonates. Disagree with me in the comments. We’ll talk about it.
I believe we’re going to shift back to thinking customer service and community management are the core and not the fringe. I believe we’re going to move our communications practices back in-house for lots of what is currently pushed out to agencies and organizations. I believe that integrity, reputation, skills, and personality are going to trump some of our previous measures of professional ability. I believe the web and our devices will continue to move into tighter friendships, and that we will continue to train our devices to interpret more of the world around us on our behalf.
I believe working remotely will become the rule, not the exception, and that we’ll replace some portion of office-meeting time with video now that it’s free-to-cheap. I believe that our business practices, processes, and output will modularize the way widgets have changed web design.
And not unlike Guy Kawasaki’s example of the ice blocks, to ice houses, to refrigerators analogy, I believe that the difference between how you perceive your role in all this and what will really make the difference is far apart.
It might be time to start thinking about jumping over a mountain. Because linear thinking won’t bring about what comes next. It will take a jet pack’s difference in your thinking.
What’s your prediction? How far off am I? What are you doing to get ready to jump over that mountain?
Photo credit, Jurvetson
What BrightKite Does Well
BrightKite allows for a granularity of “friend” adding that I appreciate. I can add someone. I can add them as a TRUSTED friend, which means they get even more private info. And then from there, I can send their updates to a stream, to my phone via SMS, or to my email account. As social networks pile upon social networks, it’s time for you to start paying attention to the features that we’ll really need. Here’s a need:
I need for networks to start realizing a delicate social situation. It’s important that I accept people who know me from my blog and twitter as “friends” on a network, while still keeping them in the “small f” category of my life (until they grow into being more). Facebook doesn’t allow this. Hell, with Friend Suggest, it’s almost the opposite lately. I’m adding six-twelve new people a week that I don’t know, but presume I know from my blog or twitter or my friends.
What else do we need? We need a persona/profile that displays different values depending on the network. A service like ZLoop has an interesting service. They allow one to make several personas from one account, such that you can be a business version of yourself, a church version of yourself, and a friends version of yourself, or whatever versions you need to support.
What do YOU need in a social network platform these days? What tools do you need for the way you WANT to do work on these networks? You can start asking, you know. They need to start differentiating soon. It might as well be with your recommendations.
Screen caps made with Skitch
Programming for the Masses- Social Computing
You are learning how to program information using new languages that have yet to be written. You might not be building the next spreadsheet software, or the next Internet browser, but I think that what you’re building might have more impact than previous software. As we learn to navigate social networks and make media, I believe we are crafting a language that will execute complex requests, deliver information back and forth between vast and distributed databases, and will overlay the way business is being done in the future.
Seeds for the Conversation
I spend time in bookstores. Sometimes, I compile lists of books I want to read. Other times, I read portions or complete selections of books.
Last night, I read The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr’s book describing how companies like Amazon and Google have paved the way for “utility computing.” The basic premise is that electricity in the 1900s went from being generated on site to being generated centrally, and that businesses stopped having to understand power generation and could thus focus on their business. Carr says companies like Amazon, with their S3 storage and their EC2 computers, and Google with search, Docs, and other apps, are letting us focus on programs instead of the gear. That’s the first seed.
Mixed into my thinking as well are an essay or two out of Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham (which talks about big ideas from the computing age), and also Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger, about how we’re learning to sort and organize information in ways different than the previous centuries of methodology.
Graham had an essay explaining programming languages, and especially how most programming languages people were learning these days were far abstracted from what computers need to know to do what they do. So that’s one seed. I started realizing that what we’re learning to do in social networks and in making social media like blogs, podcasts, wikis, and in video, is in essence, a programming language.
Weinberger’s book is some of the glue needed for the theory. His ideas are around the notion of how information is stored and retrieved, and relates to my view of our new “databases.”
What are We Learning
If you think about it, we’re learning bits of programming for this new social computing every day. If you understand how to use Twitter, with the @s and the Direct Messages, and the flow of conversation, you know a rudimentary “language.” In Facebook, you understand how to read and interpret the News stream, and you know where to seek data to synthesize information. As you learn how to blog, how to link, how to embed other technologies, you learn how to build user interfaces, how to structure queries, and how to generate reports.
What We Can Do
So far, we’re only learning the basics. Heck, we’re WRITING the language, and yet, we are using our social computing language for our own projects. For instance, the Frozen Pea Fund is a project built by threading several social networks together to build a system to help fund a breast cancer funding setup. In other cases, we’re building conversations in Utterz, which might be informal today, but which build themselves into different structures as we learn how to use them.
Most people see social computing as a tool for marketing and PR, but these are just the first rudimentary applications. We can do much more with our skills on social networks, and our ability to make, consume, distribute, and interact with social media.
Where Can We Take This
If we learn how to program in these new languages, and if we understand how to use these new forms of databases, we can learn how to use this type of programming for our business and organizational needs. Watch someone who’s adept at searching eBay and Craigslist for what they’re looking to purchase. Observe someone who knows how to use LinkedIN for more than just surfing business histories.
We are out there, learning. And this isn’t propellerhead stuff. This is understanding real information for real application in the real world. As commonplace as understanding how to use the card swipe at the grocery store, your understanding of these new social computing systems is heading us into an interesting new phase.
Can you see it? Are you with me? Or is this too far a stretch?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
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