Don't sell jobs through social networks: Students

About 70 percent of students are not in favor of the companies using social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook to offer them jobs, despite the increasing importance of social networks in corporate hiring process, according to a survey.

As per the survey conducted by hiring solutions provider TMP Worldwide and Targetjobs, 70 percent of surveyed students did not want businesses to use sites like Twitter or Facebook to sell jobs to them as they believe that employers should not exploit social media for their own benefit. However, the survey revealed that 79 percent of the respondents believe social sites were key to employers engaging with them.

In the survey, it came across that students actively use social media to research companies and confirm whether employer brand messages live up to reality and almost half of students use social media sites to chat with peers about recruitment process. In addition, about 30 percent of students chat with current employees to check if their expectations of a particular employer were met, after being taken on.

Neil Harrison, Head of Planning and Research, TMP Worldwide said, "Employers have been saying for some time that they use social networking sites to 'check up' on potential candidates, but they must now be aware that the tables have turned. Today's students use these sites as trusted places to not only communicate with friends but to also investigate potential employers; so businesses simply cannot underestimate the power of social media when it comes to brand building and engaging with undergraduates."

The report, which was based on the study of penultimate and final year students, also revealed that 42 percent of students feel social media is the ideal platform to communicate employer brand and 56 percent agree social networking sites allow candidates to get feel for company's culture.

"Employers must not however, approach social media half heartedly. They must be consistent with their brand and maintain the values they promote online throughout the recruitment, selection and ongoing retention process," said Harrison.

Subscribers Are Vital For An Online Marketing Growth Strategy

Adam Singer has posted an interesting post "Subscribers Are Vital For An Online Marketing Growth Strategy" on his blog "Online Marketing Blog" where he reveals the importance of having a commuhity to your online brand.

Singer has 9 points; the details to each of those can be found at his blog.

1. The ~11% of web users who know to use RSS include the users savvy enough to be web publishers
   
   
2. You’ll become a go-to area to link to
   
   
3. Subscribers are your sneezers
   
   
4. A base of well-connected fans could very well be the cornerstone of your social marketing strategy
   
   
5. Community is what makes sites worth visiting
   
   
6. Subscribers will motivate you to create better content
   
   
7. Consolidated network presence is the most effective
   
   
8. Social proofing
   
   
9. Subscribers and a fan base make you less reliant on push PR

My Favorite is:

#7 A consolidated network presence is the most effective

A simple, effective way to have your messages make the largest impact is to build one consolidated source for distribution. Once you’ve chosen that place, focus on funneling as many people to subscribe to it as possible and make it the authoritative voice for your brand or industry. Spawn satellite networks too, but with the purpose of feeding the main hub. Don’t lose sight that the end goal is to create one popular area.

3 Good Things About Social Media recruitment

Many entrepreneurs are using social networking and other Web 2.0 tools to recruit employees. On LinkedIn and Facebook you can learn about candidates in depth. In a typical resume, you might get a line on interests, on LinkedIn, you can find out who they associate with. On Facebook, you might find some groups and associations and even pictures. It gives us more dimensions than a static resume can offer.

The mushrooming of Web 2.0 technologies coupled with employers' heightened understanding of how to use these tools to find and hire attractive employees promises to radically reshape the recruiting landscape. There's never been a better way to proactively go out and find and hire people you think are a good fit for your position.

Todd Raphael in his post 3 Good Things About Hiring via Social Media highlights the advantages of social media recruitment:

• The company’s more prepared, and can conduct better interviews and be better at selection. If every interviewer, from recruiter to manager to senior management (if they’re involved), has read the candidate’s blog, viewed his/her videos, or perused their Tweets, they’re better prepared going in.
  
  
• The candidate’s more prepared. If the candidate has read about a company on Glassdoor.com, connected with current employees on LinkedIn, looked at what company employees are saying on Facebook, kept up with a company blog, and so on, they know more than they would by looking at company marketing-speak. They can decide themselves that they do or don’t fit.
  
  
• Onboarding. No more nervously asking random people, “tell me where the bathroom is again?” Life’s easier on the new employee because they know a lot of people on Day 1 — or at least recognize them from their Twitter photos.

Social Networks as a Market Research tool

Traditionally, marketers used demographics (compiled by market research firms) as one of the main tools to identify and target potential customers. Factors such as a person's age, sex, and where they live remain important to getting your message across to the right people.

Social networking is one of the hottest new Web technologies in sight with millions of users registering and participating around the globe. The social web is an often overlooked resource full of excellent information. Whether you’re working on a research project, building your brand, or just trying to find some information, look to social media sites to find what you’re looking for.

Participants worldwide contribute to and collaborate in readily available online discussions, creating new knowledge bases that are not yet fully recognized as information sources. Social networks typically require registration but are free to join, and significantly, to search for a vast array of reference questions, research projects, and to find experts for all kinds of requirements.

Word of mouth has always been one of the most powerful marketing methods—people more often that not use the products that their friends like and recommend. Social media sites can provide this type of data on numerous products and services. Want to find the best laptop computer? Doing a traditional Google search won't get you far. Why? Because you won't get a recommendation, or multiple recommendations. More than likely, you'll get review sites. Do a search on a social networking site, however, and I guarantee you will find a list of what people think are the best laptops.

Because of the open nature of social networking, you can easily find your customers and see what they do online and who their friends are. Friends of your customers are an excellent target market. In fact, research has shown that people are as much as five times more likely to buy a product if their friends like it.

While you may not be able to get full details of an existing customer's contacts from websites like FaceBook and MySpace, you can get a lot of valuable information. If you set up a FaceBook profile and ask to become a friend with an existing customer, you will most likely be accepted, if they liked your product. Through this one connection, you have the opportunity to identify their friends and other contacts.

Some people may argue against the ethics of this, it can certainly be effective. If you're genuine and upfront, you shouldn't have any problems. If you approach it as a problem solver, rather than a marketer, you'll be able to make some headway.

However, it's not a good idea to make unsolicited requests for friendships on these websites. You'll probably get rejected as well as banned from contacting that person again. However, if you can come up with good, interesting content you can send it along to your friend list. If people value your information, they will ultimately value you.

Use these tips to make the most out of social web research.

1. Set up alerts: Use various services to create tracking and alerts for industry keywords, your name, and any other information that is relevant to your research.
   
   
2. Filter your feeds: Monitoring social media can be time consuming, so set up your feeds to
   only deliver content that’s relevant to you.
   
   
3. Pay attention to demographics: Be sure to pay attention to the demographics of the social media users you’re using for research.
   
   
4. Monitor your reputation: Researching the social web will allow you to find out when others are talking about you and allow you to respond.
5. Use Google Search’s site: operator: By adding “site:yoursocialmediasiteofchoice,” you can delve into the depths of just about any social media site.
   
   
6. Set up feeds: Save yourself some time when researching-instead of occasionally checking for alerts, news, and other pieces of social web information, set up an RSS feed that will collect it for you.
   
   
7. Regularly assess subscriptions: Make sure you’re only following feeds that are helpful to your research by doing a review every month or quarter.
   
   
8. Perform market research on your connections: In Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools, you can turn to your own connections and learn about their interests just by monitoring the videos, images, and information they post.
   
   
9. Use a dashboard: Create your own social media monitoring dashboard in order to keep all of your research in one place.
   
   
10. Seek out authorities: On Facebook, Twitter, and other sites, get connected with users who will provide you with excellent information.
    
    
11. Look beyond who you already know: Check out your contacts’ contacts to find people that can offer you quality knowledge as well.
    
    
12. Just ask: Make use of your social media connections, and simply ask the people you know on Twitter Facebook, LinkedIn and other social sites what you’d like to find out.
    
    
13. Use “best of” features: On FriendFeed, you can use the “best of” feature to only check out the best posts of the day, week or month, so you can just skip to the good stuff.
    
    
14. Find out what’s buzzing in your niche: Use social media to track ideas and see what’s going on in your niche.
    
    
15. Check out popular posts: Use tools that will allow you to see the most popular posts on the web.
    
    
16. Research your competitors: The social web is a great place to learn about what your competitors are putting out there, and what others are saying about them.
    
    
17. Stay on top of breaking news: Use social media research to keep up with the important events happening in your niche.
    
    
18. Always check out the comments: On blogs with a good following, the comments are often as valuable as the blog post itself.
    
    
19. Get networked: Find out who is talking about issues that are relevant to your niche through social web research.
    

Social Media Goldmines

Check out these sites for the most reliable research information on the social web.

1. Delicious: Delicious is the biggest collection of bookmarks online, and can point you to high quality resources for just about anything.
   
   
2. Wikipedia: This excellent online encyclopedia offers information on just about anything you’d like to know about.
   
   
3. Digg: Digg highlights top stories and breaking news across the web.
   
   
4. Facebook: With a large enough network, you can use Facebook to crowdsource information and perform your own market research on connections.
   
   
5. Yelp: Research local businesses through the information found on Yelp.
   
   
6. Twitter: Build your Twitter follow list to include sources that can provide you with the ongoing information you seek.
   
   
7. Flickr: Find images and photographs of people, events, and more on Flickr.
   

Polls, Q&A

Ask questions and get answers with these tools.

1. BuzzDash: Using BuzzDash, you can create a poll and get community members involved.
   
   
2. LinkedIn Polls: With LinkedIn Polls, you’ll be able to find answers to your research questions by asking your network and other professionals.
   
   
3. WikiAnswers: On WikiAnswers, users can edit answers to questions anyone asks.
   
   
4. IKnowTweet: This site monitors Twitter for questions and answers.
   
   
5. Research Aid: Use Research Aid to get information via questionnaires on Facebook.
   
   
6. Ask MetaFilter: Use MetaFilter’s tags and search to find the information you’re looking for on Ask MetaFilter.
   
   
7. ToAnswer: Ask a question to @toask, and you’ll get answers through your Twitter account.
   
   
8. Answerbag: On Answerbag, you’ll be able to post questions and receive answers that others can vote on.
   

Trends

Monitor what’s popular on social media sites using these tools.

1. TweetVolume: Find out how much your keyword is discussed, and its stats to similar terms.
   
   
2. Facebook Lexicon: Check out Facebook Lexicon to see what’s being discussed on Facebook walls.
   
   
3. Technorati: Blogger Central: Check out rising links, top blogs, and more in BloggerCentral.
   
   
4. Social Radar: Social Radar offers the Ultimate social media marketing with an overview of content from blogs, social networks, feeds, news, and forums.
   
   
5. TweetScan: TweetScan will tell you who is currently talking about the keywords you subscribe to.
   
   
6. eKstreme: eKstreme shares blog data from Technorati and social bookmarks from del.icio.us.
   
   
7. Google Trends: Google Trends shares some of the hottest search trends in social media and beyond.
   
   
8. Twendz: Stay on top of Twitter conversations and trends through Twendz.
   
   
9. BlogPulse: Nielsen Buzzmetrics’ BlogPulse offers automatic trend discovery on blogs, and what’s going on in the blogosphere.
   
   
10. Trendpedia: With Trendpedia, you can see charts that show the volume of topic discussion.
    
    
11. PostRank: Using PostRank, you’ll be able to find the most talked about posts on any RSS feed.
    
    
12. Omgili Charts: Through Omgili’s Buzz Graphs, you can measure and compare the buzz of different terms.
    

Search

These tools will make it easy for you to go straight to what you’re looking for.

1. Technorati: Use Technorati’s search to find out what’s being said in the blogosphere.
   
   
2. Google Custom Search: Google Custom Search will make it easier for you to get results only from the blogs and social media websites that you’re interested in.
   
   
3. Social Mention: Social Mention searches all over user generated content to find the information you seek.
   
   
4. compfight: compfight will search Flickr for inspiration, research, and more.
   
   
5. Yahoo! Pipes: Using Yahoo! Pipes, you’ll be able to better wrangle information on the social web and beyond.
   
   
6. Keotag: Use Keotag to tag multiple search engines and generate social bookmark links.
   
   
7. BlogCatalog Social Media Search Engine: This search engine seeks out information from the BlogCatalog directory as well as more than 20 other social media sites.
   
   
8. Addictomatic: Addictomatic makes it easy for you to create your own custom page with buzz on any topic.
   
   
9. Icerocket: Icerocket will allow you to search blogs, the web, Twitte, MySpace, and more.
   
   
10. FlickrStorm: Use FlickrStorm to find related and relevant images on Flickr.
    
    
11. WhosTalkin?: This social media research tool will allow you to find topics on more than 60 popular social media sites.
    
    
12. Google Blog Search: Find recent blog posts in your keywords to get ongoing insight.
    
    
13. BoardReader: Using BoardReader, you’ll be able to search multiple message boards and forums at once.
    
    
14. Alltop: Alltop’s “online magazine rack” will help you find information about popular topics being discussed in blogs.
    
    
15. Omgili: Omgili offers a search that focuses on user generated platforms like forums, discussion groups, and other social media.
    
    
16. Twitter Search: You can search to see current conversations on Twitter.
    

Tracking & Alerts

With these tools, you can conveniently get updated whenever your keywords are mentioned on the social web.

1. Tip’d Social Tickers: SocialTickers on Tip’d will allow you to track stock tickers all over the social web.
   
   
2. ThreatTracker: Using ThreatTracker, you can identify and assess online threats to your company, brand, or product.
   
   
3. Google Alerts: Get email updates on the latest Google results for your keyword from Google Alerts.
   
   
4. TweetDeck: TweetDeck is a Twitter application that offers grouping and notifications for keywords.
   
   
5. Technorati Watchlist: Set up a Technorati Watchlist to find out when certain URLs or keywords are mentioned in blogs.
   
   
6. Wikiscanner: Wikiscanner will help you learn about anonymous Wikipedia edits from well known organizations.
   
   
7. Monitter: Set up keywords in Monitter to keep an eye on keywords on Twitter through RSS as well as live monitoring.
   
   
8. Backtype: Backtype is an excellent tool for monitoring blog comments.
   
   
9. The BuzzMonitor: Use this open source application to listen to what people are saying on blogs and other social media.
   
   
10. BoardTracker: Track words in forums with BoardTracker.
    
    
11. Yacktrack: Through Yacktrack, you can follow comments from a variety of sources all at once.
    
    
12. Filtrbox: Use Filtrbox to track your prospects, brand, competition, and investments on the social web and all over the Internet.
    
    
13. TweetBeep: TweetBeep is a reliable tool for getting alerted when someone tweets about your selected keywords.
    

Analytics & Information Gathering

Analyze and gather information with the help of these tools.

1. Adonomics: Use Adonomics to get analytics for the Facebook platform.
   
   
2. UGC Finder: Check out this tool to get information from citizen journalists.
   
   
3. SocialToo: Get daily updates on social media analytics, create surveys, and more through SocialToo.
   
   
4. Twitter Grader: Check out Twitter Grader to learn more about a Twitter user and discover related users as well.
   

Organization

Use these tools to get your social media research conveniently organized.

1. iLeonardo: iLeonardo is a social utility that can help connect people with notebooks of information.
   
   
2. PeopleBrowsr: PeopleBrowser will allow you to keep tabs on all of your most useful social networking sites at once.
   
   
3. ThinkFold: ThinkFold makes it easy to create outlines for sharing and collaboration online.
   
   
4. Netvibes: Netvibes is an excellent tool to use as an RSS social media monitoring dashboard.
   
   
5. Google Docs and Spreadsheets: Organize your documents and spreadsheets online, and keep them open for collaboration with Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
   
   
6. Bubbl.us: With Bubbl.us, you can get your thoughts organized online.
   
   
7. Zoho Notebook: Use Zoho Notebook to keep your research notes online in a handy place.
   
   
8. Zotero: Add Zotero on to Firefox, and you can collect, manage, and cite your research sources right in your web browser.
   
   
9. WebNotes: Using WebNotes, you’ll be able to highlight text, make sticky notes, and organize them all in folders.
   
   
10. Flowchart: Flowchart makes it easy to create organized charts for your notes and research information.
    
    
11. UberNote: UberNote’s tool lives where you do your research-in your browser, email, IM, mobile device, and more.
    
    
12. Backpack: Keep all of your research information together online using Backpack.
    
    
13. Google Notebook: Use Google Notebook to keep notes, clips, and more handy, with the option to access notes from your mobile device.
    
    
14. Connotea: With Connotea, you’ll be able to organize and share research information.
    
    
15. EverNote: Research and take notes both online and on the go with EverNote.
    
    
16. Google Reader: Make Google Reader your base for collecting research information from various RSS feeds.
    
    
17. Notecentric: Notecentric will allow you to organize your notes online and share them with others.
    
    
18. ClipMarks: With ClipMarks, you can save bits and pieces of any webpage, and even share them with others.
    
    
19. Remember the Milk: Remember the Milk is a great tool for project checklists and more.
    
    
20. openonmy: Use openonmy to store files up to 1GB online, so you can access them from anywhere.
    
    
21. iLighter: Highlight portions of a webpage and save them to your notebook with iLighter.

Source: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/use-social-networking-for-market-research.html

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• New Inventions in the Social Community (jonggunlee.tistory.com)

Google Wave: Implications for the enterprise

Last week Google announced their forthcoming service known as Wave to widespread coverage in both the press and blogosphere.

Created by many of the same team members that developed the highly successful Google Maps, the preview of the service itself on Thursday was quite compelling, resulting in a rare standing ovation at a tech conference.

Its egalitarian and federation-friendly design is intended to create an entire open ecosystem for communication and collaboration that Google is not-so-modestly touting as the reinvention of digital interaction circa 2009.

Wave’s relevance to the enterprise might seem premature with so many of the early and current Web 2.0 applications (blogs, wikis, social networks, Twitter-style social messaging, mashups, etc.) still — often arduously — making their way into the workplace years after their inception. Though we seem to finally be hitting a tipping point with 2.0 tools at work, Wave itself seems credible enough to get on our watchlists, at least to understand the implications.

The real question is whether there are really such significant gaps in the current state of Web-based communication that we need something new like Wave.

Wave: A communication and collaboration mashup

Google Wave itself consists of a dynamic mix of conversation models and highly interactive document creation via the browser. Using simple, open Web technologies (Google makes much of the fact that most of Google Wave is a open set of formats and architectures that is jointly developed with the Web community) Wave combines many of the key features of e-mail, instant messaging, media sharing, and social networking into a seamless experience and data set that are eponymously known as waves. All of this is opened up to developers via the Google Wave API.

While waves are relatively self-contained and use their own types of servers and data formats, they are easy to embed elsewhere or to build extensions for, enabling virtually infinite options for distribution over the Web or within the firewall, as well as rapid integration with existing applications and data. In fact, a wave is almost a form of social glue between people and the information they care about. And as we’ll see, this has implications for the enterprise world, not only with SOA but also with social communication in general as well as Enterprise 2.0 specifically.

Wave in action

What Google has done with the Wave protocol is essentially create a new kind of social media format that is distinctively different from blogs, wikis, activity streams, RSS, or most familiar online communication models except possibly IM. Both blogs and wikis were created in the era of page-oriented Web applications and haven’t changed much since. In contrast, Google Wave is designed for real-time participation and editing of shared conversations and documents and is more akin to the simultaneous multiuser experience of Google Docs than with traditional blogs and wiki editing. Though Google is sometimes criticized for missing the social aspect of the Web, that is patently not the case with waves, which are fundamentally social in nature. Participants can be added in real-time, new conversations forked off (via private replies), social media sharing is assumed to be the norm, and connection with a user’s contextual server-side data is also a core feature including location, search, and more.

The result is stored in a persistent document known as a wave, access to which can be embedded anywhere that HTML can be embedded, whether that’s a Web page or an enterprise portal. Users can then discover and interact with the wave, joining the conversation, adding more information, etc. Google has also leveraged its investments in Google Gadgets and OpenSocial, two key technologies for spreading online services beyond the original boundaries of the sites they came from. All in all, Google Wave is a smart and well-constructed bundle of collaborative capabilities with many of the modern sensibilities we’ve come to expect in the Web 2.0 era including an acutely social nature, rapid interaction, and community-based technology.

Google Wave: An enterprise perspective

The hodge podge of 1990s era (and often older, in the case of e-mail) Internet communication methods were created in another time. Blogs, wikis, IM, and so on are all useful modes of communication but there are better ways and new requirements in today’s high social, interactive, and highly integrated times. That’s not to say that many companies haven’t tried to do this already, but virtually none of them have the ability to drive the modern development community or use their existing online market share to foster adoption in the end-user marketplace like Google does. In the end, barring a major misstep from Google, chances are good that organizations will have to deal with business data in the Wave Protocol format in the future.

Let’s take a closer look at what enterprises need to know about Google Wave:

• Google Wave largely complements and doesn’t replace existing communication and collaborative applications. Google Wave creates a healthy synthesis of existing application types by providing integration across existing channels. The early demos in fact showed how Twitter and existing social networks can play very well with Google Wave, enhancing the experience and allow broader participation. Google Wave won’t replace existing apps like e-mail, IM, blogs, or wikis, and will actually make the latter two stronger through embedding. Groupware and other simultaneously collaborative apps, however, are more at risk of displacement.
  
  
• Enterprise 2.0 is well supported by Google Wave. The general capabilities of FLATNESSES, my mnemonic for all the things that a capable Enterprise 2.0 platform should do, is well embodied in Google Wave. While blogs and wikis are the fundamental Enterprise 2.0 platforms, the basic capabilities of social interaction, emergence, and freeformedness are all there, though a wave presupposes a bit more structure and situated use than the more tabula rasa blog or wiki.
  
  
• New protocols, servers, data formats, and client applications are required to use wave. Unfortunately, Google Wave brings a lot of baggage with it, though it’s mostly straightforward. You will require new software, though not on the client since that all runs in a zero-footprint browser client. This means more integration code, management, and monitoring. The best news is that everything is well-documented, open, and any organization can participate in directing the wave community, so lock-in, while always possible, seems largely avoidable and Google takes great pains to draw us to that conclusion. Google is also pushing hard for alternative implementations of the client and server components, including on-premise implementations, with the former on display at their announcement.
  
  
• Waves are a natural integration point for many enterprise services including ECM, SOA, mashups, and more. By defining a strong protocol for continuous server-side processing of live conversations, Google has enabled an entire world where our IT systems are connected to the work we do every day. Literally while participants are busy typing and collaborating, a wave can be receiving support from back-end systems such as HRM, CRM, ERP, and so on to provide data, context, and other just-in-time support. Many businesses could benefit enormously from seamless business data integration such as customers, orders, and so on, never mind the deeper possibilities of contextual business processes leveraged directly in the collaborative activities of workers. I’ve written many times about the convergence of our IT systems and Web 2.0, and this seams one of the more natural environments for it that I’ve seen in a while.
  
  
• Embedding and extensions will enable widespread distribution and consumption of waves. Google brings ease-of-development for creating server-side extension as well as simple models for user-distribution of waves. While the first will enable easy integration with local data sources and will create a large aftermarket for useful extensions such as the aforementioned language translation capabilities, the second will virtually ensure that enterprises will have interaction with waves one way or another. Since the premise of the product is also one of the dominant activities in the business world (enabling teamwork) and combined with the increasing consumerization of the workplace, it’s highly likely that organizations will encounter waves in their work with external entities, especially with partners and clients. At the very least, organizations will need to understand how waves will make their organizations even more porous on the Internet, and have policies about participating in them, just like SaaS services, social networks, and other external applications. Security will also be an issue with waves though things like integration of Web 2.0 tools and ECM will actually be easier than ever before since a corporate archive robot could ensure every wave conversation is backed up in the formal ECM system.

Google has launched many communication services since its inception including Gmail, Gtalk, Blogger to name just three, yet none of these have had such obvious business utility or attempted to reinvent the collaborative process from the ground-up. While it’s always possible that Google Wave will never broadly take off (see Mary Jo Foley’s analysis of Wave here), I’m betting that it’s likely to be one of the most interesting offerings to businesses that the company has created yet. With the open positioning, early outreach to the world, and the clarity of purpose and design, Google Wave has a good shot at helping take Enterprise 2.0 to the next level in many organizations.

It's much too soon to really decide anything about Google Wave yet, but are you putting it on your watch list? Please put your comments in the comment box below. Thank you.

Building sites around social objects

The social sites we visit today are not just friend networks - they're also built around objects that connect people with shared interests. These social objects could be anything from a photo on flickr to a video on YouTube or a track on Last.fm. This concept may not be new information to some of you - Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku, has been talking "social objects" for years now. What is interesting, though, is how well this information has held up over time.

During his presentation, Jyri talked about his five key principles for building sites around social objects. They are:

1. Define Your Object: This is the easy part, but perhaps most important. The social object will be the center of your network. On eBay, it's whatever item you're selling or buying. On Amazon, it's a product. On Flickr, it's a photo and so on.
   
   
2. Define Your Verbs: This means what do you want people to do with your social object. Do you want them to comment? Rate it? Share it? Watch it? Etc. Make sure whatever action they should take is clear and highly visible on the site.
   
   
3. Make the Objects Shareable: This is almost a no-brainer, but you would be surprised how many sites have not made it easy (or even possible!) to share the object which their site is centered around.
   
   
4. Turn Invitations into Gifts: Want your friends to join you on the network? Don't just spam them with an invite, send them something of value. Jyri mentioned how a purchase of a Skype headset years ago also included a set for a friend. Also, PayPal had originally offered a small amount of money posted to the account of your friends who signed up for the service.
   
   
5. Charge the Publishers, Not the Spectators: On any network, there are those who are creating and those who are passively consuming the content. You shouldn't charge the latter, only the former. The people who are actively using the service and are getting value from it in some way are the ones who would be willing to pay for additional features or, in some cases, just to use the service itself.

An interesting parallel to #5 is the online news industry. Today, many publishers are tossing around ideas about charging for their online content. This actually goes against his final key principal, which may be why some of those ventures won't be as successful as the publishers hope.

Microblogging: Tiny social objects. On the future of participatory media

View more presentations from Jyri Engeström.

Mashups: The Small Business Applications

While the business world races to catch up with Web 2.0 applications like wikis, RSS feeds, and widgets, the “next thing” is already here and starting to catch on fast: mashups

Mashups are a hybrid genre of Web applications that borrow from two or more other Web applications or data sources and then literally mash them up into one unique application. For example, a company called Infopia has developed a mashup that eBay sellers can use combining the data from their online stores with the tools of Salesforce.com, such as customer relationship management (CRM), inventory management, and online performance analytics.

Anyone can do it

The beauty of the mashup is how easy it is to build them. It’s basically a three-step process:

1. Choose the data sources or applications you want to mashup. This can be any combination of an internal database with a widely used application programming interface (API) from a source like Amazon.com, Google Maps, Flickr, or eBay. There are countless other APIs available to mix and match. Other ways to access data include Web feeds, like RSS, and screen scraping. Screen scraping involves using a simple program that “scrapes” data from the display output on a website.
   
   
2. Take a feed from each source and aggregate it into one mashup. This may sound like the most intimidating step. It’s not. Actually, finding the tools to build the mashup is easy. It’s more difficult finding the data. Some of the most popular mashup tools and servers include Yahoo Pipes, Microsoft Pop Fly, and Kapow Technologies. Google has a mashup editor in beta, as well. All are easy to use for the non-techie.
   
   
3. Host it. You’ll need a domain host or Web server technology that supports server-side scripting technologies like PHP or Ruby on Rails. Many mashup authors are using a company called Dreamhost. It’s cheap, well reviewed by customers and is easy to use.
   

Mashups may be good for business

Like social networking sites and other Web 2.0 trends, it’s consumers that tend to be the early adopters with the business community coming along eventually. The same seems to be true with mashups.

Some of the most publicized mashups include Weather Bonk, a mashup site that combines Yahoo! Traffic with Google Maps and various weather feeds that come up with one page featuring live traffic cams and a weather map customized by location.

However, it is the business realm where mashups will likely have their greatest impact. It’s already starting to happen. I see the following trends in business mashups:

• Data visualization. So far, this means leveraging geographical information with other data feeds. Google Maps, by far, is the most popular API used in mashups. Imagine, for example, combining Google Maps with a realtor’s feed of multiple listings in her market, combined with school district borders and educational rankings.

• Credit card processing. A popular mashup with online retailers is mashing up external credit card processing from the banks with internal e-commerce orders.

• Call center applications. Customer representatives taking calls and following up on orders by phone typically are staring at more than one screen: one of the website and the online order, the other displaying the CRM screen. We are seeing more online retailers mashing up the two (the e-commerce component with the CRM) into one view, one screen.

Mashups and the IT department

Hybrid Web applications tailor made by the user? That sounds like the makings of a migraine for the IT department. Issues to be considered include security and integration with other applications on the company network, just for starters. However, most IT managers have already learned from the proliferation and easy access of Web 2.0 tools that they’re fighting a losing battle retaining control of what online tools employees use.

I would offer the following advice to antsy IT directors: “Think of it as experimental. If the mashup proves beneficial to the business, then IT has a prototype to take and perfect.”

My thoughts on building Applications on the Facebook Platform

I’ve been working with the Facebook Platform for a few weeks now, and it’s been a very interesting experience so far, not only because I have access to millions of users immediately, but also because of the unique development environment that is offered to me right from the start.

Developing for the Facebook platform is very different from other environments that I have worked with, including Drupal, and WordPress.

WordPress makes it easier to create new pages by creating them right from the administration interface directly in your browser, without requiring you to ever muck in code.

Facebook actually, in a way, makes development somewhat more difficult because the results that you get in your browser isn’t always what you intended it to be when writing the HTML for it, or in some cases, the FBML offered by Facebook.

Certain tags are banned, whereas functionality is unique in certain areas. For example, you can only have one link in certain places such as the title of every Mini-Feed item that appears in a user’s profile, and Facebook offers its own set of tags, called FBML tags, which do Facebook-specific things such as returning the name of the current user.

Some things that I enjoy about working on the Facebook platform include the fact that I don’t have to build an entire navigational system from scratch. I don’t have to create an application’s look and feel because Facebook already provides that. Any navigation that I introduce that doesn’t use Facebook’s default navigational system provided by FBML will more likely confuse users more than help them, because to them, they are still entirely within Facebook when using Facebook Applications, and nowhere else.

Another great thing with the Facebook Platform is that an authentication system is provided right out of the box, with users who have profiles that are already filled out with tons of useful information that can greatly richen their experience with your application.

It’s been interesting developing applications so far, and hopefully I’ll be able to reveal some of the stuff that I’ve built sometime soon!

10 Major Brands Beaten to Their Own Name on Youtube

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." ~ George Bernard Shaw.

Domain squatting is nothing new. Despite a number of high-profile defeats for cyber squatters the rise of social media sites now means that major brands are at risk of having their name hijacked. Here are 10 of the biggest brands in the world who didn’t act quickly enough to secure their own Youtube page.

A conversation with Reid Hoffman of Linkedin.com

Reid Hoffman is an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. He worked at Paypal, founded LinkedIn, and invested in dozens more.

Last night, he appeared on Charlie Rose, where he talks about the rise of social networking in general, and LinkedIn’s success in particular (it is adding one million professionals every 17 days and is emerging as a “low cost provider of really good hiring services”).

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10128

Google Integrates Friend Connect with Blogger

Google has now integrated new features of google friend connect with blogger. This was announced on google’s social web blog on Feburary 26, 2009. According to google, over 3 million blogs have already added google friend connect. This is amazing considering that google friend connect is only a few months old.

Why does it matter that google friend connect is now integrated with blogger?

It’s now easier for the millions of blogger users to add friend connect to their blogs. Now anyone who is new to blogger will probably by default have google friend connect installed. Once you learn how to use google friend connect for marketing, you have a virtually unlimited supply of leads for your business.

Google is keeping a low profile as they add new features to friend connect. As friends connect through their gmail account, blogger, open social, twitter, and other social applications google friend connect will soon reach 100 million users. My prediction is that this happens in the next 12-24 months.

How can you take advantage of google friend connect?

1. Put Google Friend Connect on Your Website as soon as possible.
   
   
2. List Your Website at FriendConnectCentral.com. You can list for free, or get a premium listing for only $1.97 a month. Premium listings deliver targeted traffic and friends to your website.
   
   
3. Connect with friends across google. Make friends with people on other websites through google friend connect.

Many people are already profiting tremendously through google friend connect.

Gaming and the Future Workplace

It has been my long-held belief that the "gaming idiom" will increasingly find its way into workplace social computing applications. I suspect that this is reasonably closely related to what Stowe Boyd terms flow as it relates to Enterprise 2.0 dynamics and the applications that will be used to work "in flow".

With a substantial $3 million in funding, University of California, Irvine plans to study "how emerging forms of communication, including multiplayer computer games and online virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life can help organizations collaborate and compete more effectively in the global marketplace."

Although virtual worlds technology may have initially been created for games, they have far exceeded that use. virtual worlds seem to be the next communications medium that will transform how we do business and live our lives. Consider that virtual worlds allow us to be "present" with each other in the same "place" unlike any technology yet developed. It creates immersive shared experiences spontaneously, and without travel.

Virtual world environments and other technology-enabled forms of communication are gaining popularity as organizations worldwide are decentralizing. To grow and promote efficiency, companies need to develop long-distance, collaborative communication methods. The researchers plan to help in that arena, using innovations such as large-scale multiplayer online games, social networking, and file and media sharing.

To gain real-world perspective, UCI researchers are collaborating with five organizations from aerospace, telecommunications, transportation and electronics industries as well as the Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana. The companies already are experimenting with the technologies in group planning, decision-making and training.

Virtual worlds are better because they create immersive experiences for people to share as if they were together in person. Nothing else achieves the feeling of togetherness that virtual worlds do. Teleconference, although an improvement over the telephone, is not immersive. Nor does it deliver a unique and memorable experience. Telepresence is much better, but it is largely immobile and very expensive. Virtual worlds can be accessed from a desktop, inexpensively. They are highly flexible and allow for redesign and redevelopment. Tomorrow your virtual conference room could be a medieval castle, if you so desire. Interactions within virtual worlds feel real, are highly memorable, and transform relationships. Additionally, other media such as video and audio can be fed into virtual worlds to enhance the experience.

It is easy for companies to enact policies prohibiting the use of these technologies. But then they would be "throwing out the baby with the bathwater." Virtual worlds and other Web 2.0 technologies, like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, can be tremendously powerful and effective business tools.

iSkoot’s Kalaida Platform Makes Your Plain Phone Smarter

From Techcrunch.com :

iSkoot, the startup that specializes in creating software for the billions of mobile phones that aren’t smartphones, has released its new Kalaida Platform, allowing users to access their social networks, RSS feeds, and Email from their basic cell phones.

The platform includes support for Facebook, Email, instant messaging, and RSS news services, and international carriers can add or remove services to suit their regions. Kalaida Platform is a big step for the company, which was previously best known for its mobile Skype client. The platform stems from iSkoot’s acquision of Social.im last September.

iSkoot’s Kalaida Platform works with most phones, but it still requires a dataplan - something that many users with basic phones don’t have (at least in the United States). The carriers will love this, as it will drive some users to spring for their unlimited data packages, but iSkoot will still have to fend off competitors, who include Mig33 and Trutap.

Recruiting 2.0

Many entrepreneurs are using social networking, blogging and other Web 2.0 tools to recruit employees. Swati, 34, is particularly enthusiastic about using LinkedIn and Facebook to learn about candidates in depth. "In a typical resume, you might get a line on interests," he says. "On LinkedIn, you can find out who they associate with. On Facebook, you might find some groups and associations and even pictures. It gives us more dimensions than a static resume can offer."

In addition to these well-established general-purpose services, the staffing industry is beginning to offer Web 2.0-style functionality for staffing-specific websites. jobirn.com hooks up candidates, employers and recruiters via IM rather than conventional but slower e-mail.

The mushrooming of Web 2.0 technologies coupled with employers' heightened understanding of how to use these tools to find and hire attractive employees promises to radically reshape the recruiting landscape. There's never been a better way to proactively go out and find and hire people you think are a good fit for your position.

The prices are especially compelling compared to recruiters' fees for successful placements. "Facebook and LinkedIn don't charge 20 to 30 percent fees if you hire someone," Swati says. "Some recruiters may hunt me down for saying this, but in this economy, everybody needs to be watching the bottom line."

The ability to search through resume-like job histories on LinkedIn, blogs, social networking sites and other Web 2.0 resources offers employers some appealing new communication and research channels, to be sure. But Web 2.0 recruiting has a few rough edges, as well. For one thing, more recruiters are joining than employees.

Referrals can work if employers encourage employees to post information about job duties and corporate culture, says Preeti. "If your employees are your biggest assets, why not leverage them to help you differentiate your company and attract and recruit future talent?"

Another problem is that popular sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace are designed for person-to-person networking, not job recruiting. These sites rely on e-mail, which is slower and less interactive than IM. Even though Twitter offers [real-time] messaging, people get a lot of noise. On Jobirn, everything is about the job.

Relying heavily on Web 2.0 recruiting can also hamstring efforts to recruit a diverse work force. For instance, notes Goldy, if you use Web 2.0 technologies to recruit minority or older workers, their lower rates of computer ownership and internet usage will make them harder to find, not easier. Likewise, top executives are probably not best recruited using a Web 2.0 strategy. "If it's a vice president or senior vice president, the likelihood we're going to find someone who's a good fit isn't as high when you're using these social networking tools," Goldy says.

Ultimately, no one sees Web 2.0 as a substitute for human recruiters and interviewers. "It cannot and will not ever replace face-to-face conversation," Swati says. "It should and can only be used to cast the net wider to find more qualified individuals who have a better understanding of what you're looking for and to get a better understanding of who they are."

As various services enter the world of Web 2.0 recruiting, including some that were never designed for that kind of work, Swati is excited about the concept of "cloud recruiting." "That's the ability to leverage all Web 2.0 opportunities at the same time," he says.

Until then, the Web 2.0 recruiting pioneers will find a slightly clunky but, according to fans, highly effective and little-populated world of recruitment strategies. But it may not be thinly peopled for long. Says Goldy, "Given that it comes at a very low cost and does have such a strong influence on attitudes toward the organization and intentions to pursue employment, organizations would be foolish not to make this part of their recruiting package."

Social Media Google Slap

Just watch the video, it's worth it if you're at all concerned about how your website ranks in the SERPs.

She makes a very good point that if your strategy is to bookmark across hundreds of sites you're going to be in trouble. What she doesn't talk about is the quality of links from those sites. The problem with bookmarking using an autobot to get hundreds of links is that you don't get any internal support from the site -- it's just a submission with a single vote. From what everyone is hearing, Google is slapping those types of links hard.

The good news is that if you concentrate on a few high authority social media sites and get a strong number of internal links to your post (votes), you'll be that much ahead of the people that are relying upon numbers of links rather than quality.

Social media will still be important, but you need to build a strong profile with lots of incoming links (friends) to your profile and lots of incoming links (votes) to your submissions. A Digg story with 1 vote will be pretty much useless. A Digg story with 50 votes that sits in upcoming for a few days will be very powerful.

Also, don't discount the power of social media to bring traffic and other links. While you get no SEO value from a storm of StumbleUpon hits, you're likely to pick up some links as other webmasters are exposed to your content. And the evidence is building that Google is looking at its toolbar data to determine rankings. Sites that get more traffic tend to perform better in the rankings. So don't throw away traffic from sites that don't necessarily convert well because in the end that traffic helps your rankings in many indirect ways.

Next Generation Social Marketing

Next Generation Social Marketing

View more presentations from weinreich. (tags: issues health)

More companies use social media for marketing

From SentinalSource.com

Social media marketing is spreading as companies including SAS, Red Hat, Blue Cross and others recognize the benefits of blogs, online video and social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and more. According to Forrester Research, the number of social media “spectators” — people who read or watch social media — has increased from 48 percent last year to 69 percent of people who venture online.

There are tons of studies that say word-of-mouth is more effective than any other marketing, and this is essentially word-of-mouth online.

People are talking about you and your brand and your issues. The only question is whether you want to have an influence on it.

How Social Networking Sites Have Changed The Breakup Game

In the musical "South Pacific," Nellie made breaking up sound easy when she sang, "I'm gonna wash that man right outa my hair."

But Nellie didn't have Facebook in 1949, when the musical opened. If she had, forgetting him might have been a lot harder.

With Facebook, it's only a click away, and news of an ex even arrives unbidden, unless you take steps to stop it. There are constant reminders.

Indeed, all that interwoven connectedness, which can help ease the way into a relationship, makes it all the harder to disengage at the end.

Even if you do "unfriend" an ex, you'll still most likely encounter him often on the Facebook sites of mutual friends where his photos and comments may likely turn up.

If it's over, it's not quite over on Facebook. Updates like "Barry is in a new relationship" or "Sarah went dancing all night last night" or photos of your ex with a new man are sure to rankle.

It's all part of the fish-bowl visibility — from start to finish — that social networking sites give to what once were largely private matters of the heart.

For the mostly teens and twenty-somethings who live out their romantic lives on Facebook, the flirting often begins with one person posting a seemingly casual comment on another's wall. The very public nature of the wall — a space on a user's profile where friends can post messages — makes it possible to explore the possibility of a relationship without revealing much.

In the past, when a relationship flourished, it might be marked by a pin or a letter sweater or a friendship ring. Today it often leads to a talk: Should we change our status on Facebook from being single to being in a relationship? Or, with the more dysfunctional dyad, one member may post a change in his or her relationship status without telling the other.

Which brings us to breaking up in the Facebook arena. Libby Simpson's boyfriend had just broken up with her when she started getting calls from friends who weren't her closest asking, "How are you?" "Are you OK?"

"What are you talking about?" Simpson, a junior at the University of Massachusetts, asked them.

"We saw it on Facebook," they said. Her ex, Andrew, had changed his status to single, and an automatic message had been sent out, accompanied with a broken heart, signaling the end of their relationship.

"I was kind of mortified," said Simpson, who has 342 friends on Facebook. "First of all I was just getting over the shock, saying OK, this is real … I didn't get out of bed for a week."

After such an experience, many Facebook users opt not to record any details about their romantic status, so that if it changes, at least they avoid having any notifications sent out. After the break-up, Simpson also weathered the Facebook updates containing tidbits about Andrew's whereabouts, reminding her of what he was doing, which friends he was seeing.

Kathleen Bogle, a professor of sociology at La Salle University in Philadelphia and the author of "Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus," said having so much access to information about your ex "can really take jealousy to a new level."

Michael Rabby, an assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Portland in Oregon and an expert on relationships and the Internet, said it's a "hard-and-fast rule, if you break up with somebody, you really should 'unfriend' them.

"You don't want to know if they are dating or really what they are feeling because you're not going to really, recover. You're not going to heal yourself if you're constantly attuned to what your ex is doing."

But many don't "unfriend" easily, even with someone they are mad at.

Back to Nellie and the late '40s. Turns out she had more trouble than she thought in her plan to "drum him out" of her "dreams." By the end of the play, she and her boyfriend are back together.

The Art of Schmoozing

Guy Kawasaki has a great post up on "The Art of Schmoozing." It's full of great advice. So read it, and let me know, what can I do to make this blog more useful to you?

Social Networks Help Serve Customers

Social computing was hailed as a useful tool to gauge customer sentiment last week during a panel session at a Microsoft-sponsored conference.

Panelists from companies such as Dell, Intel Capital, and Sony detailed their experiences with social computing, in which computing is used as a platform for social interaction, at the Microsoft Global High Tech Summit 2009 event in Santa Clara, Calif. Social bookmarking, wikis, blogs, and e-mail constitute some forms of social computing based on the definition utilized by the panel.

At Dell, company founder Michael Dell in 2006 sought to identify customers dissatisfied online and solve their problem, said Bob Pearson, Dell vice president of communities and conversations.

"What we realized is we first needed to understand the landscape, what was actually being said about us," and put in place a good monitoring system and change company behaviors, he said.

There were 5,000 to 10,000 conversations about Dell happening everyday, and Dell wanted to monitor this. "We actually created a blog resolution team," Pearson said. Dell reaches out to people dissatisfied with the company to try to solve their problems, he said.

Sony also realized that tens of thousands of customers were conversing about Sony, said Rick Clancy, senior vice president of corporate communications at Sony Electronics. "It was a conversation we realized we needed to be a part of," Clancy said. Social computing provided a great opportunity to deal directly with consumers one on one, he said.

"The partnership that has emerged between communications and social networking with our customer service platform has been a tremendous success," said Clancy.

Social computing at enterprises still is in its early stage, said Robert Rueckert, director of Intel Capital.

"I really believe that most enterprises are just starting [down] the pathway," Rueckert said. Corporations would like to communicate not just with customers and employees, but also with partners, he said.

Dell, for its part, wants to expand social computing to business-to-business communications, Pearson said.

Companies without a social computing strategy have their employees already employing the concept on blogs or wikis, Rueckert said. Or, conversations are happening somewhere besides the company Web site, he said

"If you're an enterprise and you don't have a strategy around it, it's already happening," he said.

Panel moderator Brett Bonthron, partner at the TCG Advisors consulting firm, likened social computing to an improved version of knowledge management. "To me, one of the great things about social computing is its knowledge management done right," he said. Unlike knowledge management, social computing lets people contribute to conversations on their own terms, Rueckert said.

Social networking tools can produce expertise in surprising ways, said Rob Howard, CEO and founder of Telligent Systems, which offers social computing solutions.

"One of the most amazing trends that we've found is as companies adopt it, they quickly figure out that the expertise that they're looking for in an organization isn't always defined by organizational boundaries," Howard said. Someone might help with supply chain management who is not on the supply chain management team, he said.

ERP products have lacked social computing capabilities, according to Rueckert, "They're not as far along as the customers would like them to be," Rueckert said.