Social media’s 2.0 moment: Responsiveness beats planning. In 2004, O’Reilly Media delivered a counter-cultural (at the time) message: The dot-com bubble had burst, but the web was here to stay as an economic and social force. The meme they coined was Web 2.0, and their manifesto was captured in a seminal blog post by Tim O’Reilly. Web 2.0 was not meant to indicate a version number, but to point out the deep, persistent patterns of the web that were rewiring business and society. I led the consulting practice at O’Reilly Media after we coined the term Web 2.0, and I think we now find ourselves at a similar (though softer) inflection point.
There are a lot of valid questions regarding the business models in social: Is Facebook not a scalable vehicle for advertising and thus overvalued? Is Groupon bad for merchants and thus doomed to fail? Was social gaming (and Zynga) overhyped? So what are those design patterns? Responsiveness beats planningCommunities beat audiencesReputation beats brandingSociality beats media-mentality Examples: 6 Social Business Trends. Before firing off some trends at you, let me explain to you why Social Business is important. Social Business is important because we are leaving the era of industrialisation in which we closely rely on technology to create large scale manufacturing solutions that consisted of mainly routine tasks. As you might have experienced yourself and what researchers have uncovered more clearly: work is becoming more non routine. Take that combined with a more equal playing field in publishing, since in the past you used to have either the money or sources to publish via a printing press or it successors, and the world has changed.
What not has changed over the last few years is organizations. And you cannot blame them for it, all them are, as my colleague Gopal Padinjaruveetil puts it (to quote him freely): We have a situation where the Business Users are in the 21st century, the Enterprise IT Department is in the 20th century and IT – Business Processes are in the 19th century. The slides 1. 2. Keynote Slides: Converging Your Paid+Owned+Earned Media #MUS13. How to add threaded comments to your Facebook page. Facebook Page contests: What you can and can’t do. Courtesy of SocialCandy via Creative Commons The dos and don’ts of hosting a Facebook contest Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, marketers, Web publishers, marketers.
If you’re confused about Facebook’s terms for promotions and contests allowed on your page, you’re not alone. The other day I received an email from a subscriber asking about this specific example: The terms clearly say you can’t use a comment, like or share a as a condition of entry to a page, like the above example. But the Facebook Terms of Service aren’t that clear about liking a page: Liking a page IS all right – This part of the Terms of Service seems to say liking a page is fine: “You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page.”
Use a third-party app for entry. Why am I banned from following my teachers on Facebook and Twitter? | Technology. The issue of cyber-bullying can just as easily affect teachers, as well as pupils. Photograph: Alamy In every school there are young, attractive teachers that all the girls and all the boys fancy: there was probably one in your school, there's at least one in your child's school, and there's probably one in my school in Manchester – but that would be telling. Everyone has fond memories of that poor object of forbidden excitement. The difference today is that you can follow that teacher on Twitter and Facebook. "Staff must not use social networks to communicate with students" is the guidance given in my school's e-safety policy. Obviously, there are safeguarding issues that the guidance seeks to comply with – the scores of well-publicised sexual relationships between pupils and teachers are evidence enough to stigmatise this kind of 'online contact'.
So, do teachers have a responsibility to tweet/post responsibly? There is no way of creating 'safe' online spaces using Twitter. The City of Chicago wants you to fork its data on GitHub. GitHub has been gaining new prominence as the use of open source software in government grows. Earlier this month, I included a few thoughts from Chicago’s chief information officer, Brett Goldstein, about the city’s use of GitHub, in a piece exploring GitHub’s role in government. While Goldstein says that Chicago’s open data portal will remain the primary means through which Chicago releases public sector data, publishing open data on GitHub is an experiment that will be interesting to watch, in terms of whether it affects reuse or collaboration around it. In a followup email, Goldstein, who also serves as Chicago’s chief data officer, shared more about why the city is on GitHub and what they’re learning. Our discussion follows. What has your experience on GitHub been like to date?
Brett Goldstein: It has been a positive experience so far. This is a new experiment for us, so we are learning along with the community. Why use GitHub, as opposed to some other data repository? How to Make Space for Social Media - Alexandra Samuel. By Alexandra Samuel | 9:00 AM March 6, 2013 Few professionals were sitting at their desks in 2004, eyeing the empty slots in their calendars and wishing that somebody would just invent a new way of communicating to fill those long and lonely minutes. People’s calendars were already full. Social media demanded attention. It had to be put into the rotation, but that doesn’t mean we took something else off our calendars to accommodate it. Instead we just added it to the marketing teams’ tasks, challenging them to figure it out until they could make a business case for hiring full-time social media staffers. Flash forward a decade, and any organization with serious social media ambitions has those full-time staffers.
For individuals however, it’s harder to expand and reassign resources. If social media is worth doing, than it’s worth making time for. But all too many of us decide that social media is worth doing without deciding what is worth giving up for it. Four Ideas for Creating Mobile Strategy - B. Bonin Bough. By B. Bonin Bough | 12:00 PM March 6, 2013 Mobile technology presents all marketers with a tantalizing proposition. Mobile devices function like an extension of ourselves, present throughout every moment of our day, an arm’s reach away at night, and panic-inducing when outside our reach. They are globally ubiquitous, and ownership frequently transcends economic and social boundaries. The chance to tap into this ever-present and intimate consumer channel at such tremendous scale seems like a no-brainer for marketers. The key reason behind this hesitation is the speed at which mobile reached scale, coupled with the unrelenting pace of disruption in the mobile ecosystem.
At my company, Mondelēz International, we’re bullish on mobile because it’s so right for our particular business. 1. 2. 3. 4. Adapting to changes in the mobile landscape is a requirement for any competitive brand. The Future of AdvertisingAn HBR Insight Center.
Security awareness. Politics and Social Media: Why Eastern Europe’s politicians are all atwitter. Another blog post that won’t make any money | MediaFile | Analysis & Opinion. It’s been a strange and daunting decade for print journalism — it’s now an even stranger time for web journalism. We’ve become accustomed to reading headlines like BuzzFeed’s recent $19 million fund raising, followed by news of buyouts for veterans at the New York Times. This kind of zero sum flow of media resources from print old guard to the young online folks has started to feel inevitable — it’s not even clear that media reporters still care about the NYT. All of this would be more comforting if the media business were headed to some cushy new world. Evangelists have long held up the web as the savior of the news business, the future of TV and the ideal for the self-expression business.
They could be right. But all that digital triumphalism ignores web media’s basic economic dilemma: we’re simply producing far too much of it than is economically justified. The dirty secret about the web media business is that there’s a massive oversupply problem. Browser stats for Q4 2012 and all of 2012. Page last changed today It’s time for some mobile browser stats, as always according to StatCounter. Here are the figures for Q4 last year, as well as for 2012 as a whole. Summary: an excellent year for Google’s browsers. If you’re so inclined you can see ominous portents of the approaching WebKit apocalypse in these numbers. Non-WebKit browsers are losing market share everywhere. Let’s start with the Q4 figures. On the mobile side we see Android regaining its upward swing after a few quarters of stagnation.
Opera, meanwhile, has gone into slight but unmistakable decline. Gains for UC, which is strengthening its position, and also for Firefox, which appeared on my radar last quarter. I wonder who’ll reach 2% first: IE, Chrome, or Firefox. On the desktop side Chrome continues its onward march, and leaves IE and Firefox behind. Now the yearly figures for 2009-2012. When seen year-over-year Android’s growth is even more impressive: 33% in one year. The real story is in the last row, though. Social Media as Modern Sorcery - Alfredo Behrens. Those who feel wronged by corporations have increasingly taken to social media to get their revenge. For business, this represents a threat — and an opportunity — that obviously can’t be ignored. A 2012 Nielsen survey found that people value advice from online peers on both what to buy as well as what to avoid. Almost two in three of those who review products online say they do so to protect others; an additional one in four use social media to punish corporations for their own bad experiences.
This disciplining of brands through social media is a global phenomenon, but there are important regional differences and corporations would do well to localize their response. This is especially true in emerging markets, which are rapidly catching up with wealthy nations in online penetration. The U.S. may have the most Facebook members of any country, at about 170 million people. Is there anything that corporations have learned in developed markets which might be transferable? Facebook Graph Search, Heaven and Hell for Enterprises. You might have heard of the introduction of Facebook’s Graph Search. Which is just a difficult name for social search.
Facebook enables you to explore your network, their likes, their connections and basically all the data they share with you in a very natural way. For example you can search for: Friends who live in Spijkenisse (My home town)Single friends who live in Spijkenisse and like beerSingle male friends who live in Spijkenisse who like beer and soccer As you can see Facebook can find everything that has some kind of relation with one and other.
And that exactly why it is both heaven and hell for enterprises. Why could this be hell for enterprises? It might be obvious, if you can search for nice relations, you can search for bad relations as well. Employees of company X that like racismEmployees of company X that like getting drunkEmployees of company X that like the holocaustOr less harmful: “People who work at Coca-Cola and who like Pepsi” With Tweet-to-Buy, American Express Values its Community at $10 - Ferenc Huszar. By Ferenc Huszar | 1:27 PM February 13, 2013 American Express got the social media world talking this week when it announced a Tweet-to-Buy partnership with Twitter. The concept is simple: Users can sync their American Express cards to their twitter accounts, and then buy $25 gift cards for only $15 by tweeting the hashtag #BuyAmexGiftCard25.
In essence American Express gives $10 free credit for a branded tweet. In principle, $10 per tweet is worth giving away if American Express expects the tweet to result in at least $10 net profit in the future. But how does one formulate that? When companies like American Express offer discounts, they often justify the spend by referring to the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
This is usually calculated as the expected net profit attributed to purchases during the entire relationship between a business and its customer. But American Express is now buying something different: they are not thinking CLV, they are buying Customer Network Value (CNV). Stop Selling Ads and Do Something Useful - Joe McCambley. Banner ads didn’t always suck. I should know. I helped create the first one. My children tell me that’s like inventing smallpox. It was October 1994, a fantastically idealistic time on the Internet. Many pioneers of digital advertising believed it possible to create advertising so useful it’s a service. We knew that if we asked ourselves, “How can we help people?” That first banner that Modem Media, the fledgling digital agency where I worked, built for AT&T, was helpful, and it was useful. Not only did people love the experience, they loved it enough to share it with friends. For a few wonderful years, while big agencies slept with their backs to the Web, we did incredible work for major brands — not ads, but content experiences that delivered utility.
By 1998, though, spending on Internet advertising had grown to the point where the established agencies woke up. But this is a very interesting time. Storm #1 Consumers are migrating in droves to mobile devices. We check news on Twitter. When HR Decisions Become Social Media Scandals - Alexandra Samuel. By Alexandra Samuel | 1:00 PM February 8, 2013 We’ve just seen two spectacular stories of how employee dismissals can go dramatically awry in the era of social media.
First, Applebee’s waitress Chelsea Welch was fired for posting a photo on Reddit that showed a customer receipt inscribed with a anti-tipping (but pro-religion) message: “I give God 10%. Why do you get 18?” Between the original Reddit post, Welch’s subsequent article for The Guardian, and a flurry of on- and offline coverage, Applebee’s found itself at the center of a firestorm that gave everyone from labor organizers to social media evangelists something to fret about. The very next day, we were treated to a first-person account of a mass HMV layoff, as the company’s Online Marketing and Social Media Planner live tweeted her own firing… from the company’s own Twitter account. While one might reasonably debate who was at fault in each of these cases, it’s hard to argue that either situation was good news for the employer. Building Customer Communities Is the Key to Creating Value - Bill Lee.
The Unfair Stigmatization of Digital Notetaking - Alexandra Samuel. By Alexandra Samuel | 12:00 PM January 31, 2013 My last blog post argued that colleagues who come to a meeting with a paper notebook instead of a digital device are wasting their own time and that of their colleagues. That argument met with a small uproar here and on Twitter, where many readers were outraged by the idea of prescribing or proscribing a particular approach to note-taking, even if there were also those who welcomed my assault on paper.
“Why not consider the fact that people process information differently and have respect for the fact that not everyone operates in a single fashion?” Asked one not-atypical comment. As Becki True put it, “[l]et’s judge people’s effectiveness on their results, and not on their methods.” Or as Scott Berkun wrote on his own blog, “[i]t’s only after I see what people produce that I’d consider commentary on the means they used.” If we’re outraged at the idea of stigmatizing paper, shouldn’t we be at least as outraged by rules like these?
Invest in Digital Marketing to Control Your Destiny - Michael Schrage. It's Time to Cut Back on Social Media - Dorie Clark. Should I leave a comment on TED.com? A commenting manifesto. The Wearable Brand, Tracking Your Every Move - Mitch Joel. Saying goodbye to pen and paper. Dear Colleague, Put the Notebook Down - Alexandra Samuel. Digital Strategy Does Not Equal IT Strategy - Mark P. McDonald. How Presidential Elections Made Social Media Marketing Banal - Dorie Clark. The High Price of Social Media Risk Management - Alexandra Samuel. Breakdown: A Strategy for Engaging Passion Communities.
Quick, Hide the BlackBerry, It’s Too Uncool. SocialTech4Biz. Walmart's Angry Workers Use A Web Spoof To Rain On The Company's Anniversary. Happy 30th birthday, compact disc! Watch a demo from the first TED, in 1984. Nicholas Negroponte’s 1984 TED Talk: 5 predictions for the future (4 of them correct) How to Build Trust in a Virtual Workplace - Keith Ferrazzi. How To Create Your First iPhone App (2012 Edition) Breakdown: Corporate Social Media Team.