Are You Ready For The Social Tool Invasion?

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One of the challenging areas of social media is understanding how “social tools” can be effectively used within the business. Today, companies such as Dell have made Twitter a core part of their toolset, not only in providing brand awareness, but also a key revenue generator for the company. However, how will social tools evolve in the future? What will these tools look like within five years? Should organisations invest time now in social media adoption, or simply ignore as it as a passing fad?

Gartner, released their social media predictions for 2010 and their insights provide an interesting vision, on how social tools may interact with the way employees choose to work in the future.

Here are Gartner’s five best practice predictions for social software:

1. By 2014, social networking services will replace email as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

2. By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.

3. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.

4. Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modelled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.

5. Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilise social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

Social networking replacing email within four years sounds outrageous! But how many organisations are ready to embrace social technologies within the Enterprise? Technology is one thing, but certain members of staff will also need training to get them up to speed. “Digital natives” who enter the workforce may indeed be the ones that push companies to adopt social tools beyond the firewall.

Microblogging applications such as Twitter are being used more and by companies all over the web. However, to address privacy issues, start-ups such as Yammer have produced Twitter clones that are able to broadcast updates that can only be seen within the organisation. Gartner certainly sees this trend taking off yet further.

70% of IT-dominated social media initiatives may indeed fail. Why? Because many IT departments have traditionally failed to understand the needs of the business. Typically, they have built vast networks that are locked down. For social tool adoption to succeed, these big structures will need to be redesigned. A job easier said than done!

Smartphones are becoming more and powerful. But also the User Interface (UI) is becoming easier to use too. Widgets and small apps, now replace complex programs and connect to a variety of cloud based services. People are not only social, data is also going that way too.

Changing existing IT policies, educating the workforce and allowing the use of social tools within the Enterprise takes time. There is no silver bullet for deployment and effective use. However, early adopters are likely to see increased collaboration and agile working practices. Whereas, in some sectors such as regulatory bodies, the changes will be less profound.

But what do you think? As social tools open up and evolve, will we one day replace corporate mail with Facebook Mail?

You can read Gartner’s full press release here.


Are you Linking In?

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Are you looking for a great way to raise your profile or that of your business? Well, LinkedIn offers a great way to share your business experience in a more professional way. If you’ve never used LinkedIn, but have heard of others using it and aren’t sure what it is, Common Craft’s excellent video will provide a great overview.

Inspired? Excellent! I have been using LinkedIn for many years and have found it to be an excellent tool. It can help you build your professional network and market your services.  If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, don’t worry. I’ve included a LinkedIn starter guide to help you begin. Take a look below:

AVG LinkedIn Starter Guide

View more presentations from Jas Dhaliwal.

 

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Learn and Earn with the Gift of Collaboration

Microsoft’s Mel Carson and all round good guy, has released an excellent Social Media White Paper this week.

Mel works within Microsoft’s Advertising Community Team, which has been engaging with online advertisers through social media since 2006. The document entitled, “Learn and Earn” tells the story of how the Advertising team embraced social media to connect with the advertising community. Well worth reading.

During my time at Microsoft, I modelled the MVP Award Program Facebook Fan Page on the Microsoft Advertising Fan Page! So thank you Mel and team for the inspiration!

Read the document in full below.


Learn and Earn – Social Media White Paper – Microsoft Advertising –

Reflections from Social Media in the Enterprise Talk

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Welcome to Social Media Week! This week, conferences are taking place simultaneously in New York City, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto and São Paulo. The overall goal of Social Media Week is to advance the use and understanding of social media and the impact it has on culture, business communications and society. Also, it is a great opportunity to meet other bloggers, tweeters and thought leaders in the social media space.

I attended a talk entitled “Social Media in the Enterprise” at Cass Business School earlier this week. Each speaker had 10 minutes to present their thoughts to the assembled collective of approximately 40 people. The remainder of this post are the notes I made from listening to each of the speakers. I hope you find it interesting.

Alan Patrick from Broadsight, kicked off the event with the challenges social media faces when looked upon by Enterprise. He looked at three areas where it can present a Return On Investment. These include:

  • Innovation (Crowd sourcing and buzz catching)
  • Operational Value (Sales, and reducing operating costs)
  • Speed to Respond (Business agility, JIT and the speed to react to market changes)
    Alan’s presentation can be seen below:

Umair Haque presented an enlightening talk on how organisations can be improved. He argued that today’s Enterprises are built around an outdated structure of rigid hierarchies – this structure is no longer efficient. Creativity is stunted and thus these organisations can be termed “Peak Organisations.”  A new dynamic structure could be the answer. Today’s social media tools allow the most skilled individuals to lead, not just the the hierarchal manager. Gifted leaders emerge organically. Therefore, do we need leadership at all? Social tools allow us to connect to people with the knowledge to help us make decisions that maximise value

Benjamin Ellis’s talk focused on how people are the key component in business. However, most Enterprises are scared of going social. (They associate social as a term relating to a “lack of control.” They prefer using email, as it is the quickest method to get your point across in the shortest time. He went on to state that businesses also spend a lot of time examining ROI. However, in the businesses that Benjamin has worked with, ROI actually meant Randomly Oriented Integers! :-).   Social Media, (if not used with caution) can cause more problems than solve answers. Knowledge and access to information could be withheld. For social media to succeed, the tools have to be simpler than using email.

Mat Morrison delivered a presentation detailing the research that he has carried out within organisations. An interesting insight from his research showed that, if an organisation grows organically, a few people within the company are actually the most connected to other parts of the organisation. If they are removed, the network fails. Therefore, some level of design planning is required to ensure that everyone within the network is “properly” connected to everyone else. Therefore, if some people are removed, the rest of the network does not suffer. Mat also juxtaposed market norms versus social norms. Employee social capital is good for the business, especially if they tweet about the company and products. However, it is difficult to account for all the positive benefits that it can bring to the balance sheet.

Mat’s presentation can be seen below:

Dr Sue Black described her live case study on how she used social media to raise awareness and funding to save Bletchley Park. Since the war, the historic site has fallen into disrepair. Through an adhoc Twitter campaign, Sue managed to get support from London Twitter users to raise awareness. Twitter also proved to be a disintermediary.  She managed to reach out to Stephen Fry, without the need to go through PR agents or other traditional “blockers”. Fry, visited Bletchley Park and used his public image to further spread the message. Sue’s (part time) campaigning, saw her blog traffic jump to over 8,000 visitors! Her success was due to her passion, and her ability to use Twitter to find and connect with people who were equally likeminded about the cause, and were able to help.

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Flickr Credit: Benjamin Ellis  Dr Black and I talk to J G Rae at the event

Adriana Lukas’s talk looked at how social media can act as catalyst for business. However, she pointed out that transforming companies from within is going to be difficult. Not everyone is convinced at how social tools can help the business. Some departments may not understand them and therefore may support the use of them. Thus, she suggested it may be an idea to deploy the use of social media tools secretly and completely independent of the IT department as a “skunkworks” project. Build a successful pilot, before proving the worth of it to others in the business. (This scares me). The idea here is that the creativity and “openess” that social media brings, does  not affect existing business processes.  A classic line from her presentation read “Wave good-bye to business cases, say hello to case studies.” Those who want to change are not the ones building the barricades!”

Finally, David Terrar presented an opposing view to Adriana’s talk. Rather than deploy an “under the radar” approach. David, discussed that the way forward was to get management buy-in, before deploying social tools. His overarching point, social tools MUST work together with existing business processes. Over time, the social tools will help to modify existing business processes as their value is demonstrated. He went on to show examples of how social tools have been successfully applied to large businesses such as Cisco, Swiss Re, and ICAEW. 

Overall, it was a very stimulating evening of discussion surrounding Social Media, and how people view it both internally and externally to the Enterprise.

A big thanks to all of the speakers and especially Alan and Patrick for putting on the event.


Keep It Simple – Coke’s New Social Media Principles

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Andy Serovitz posted a very interesting blog post on how Coca Cola have devised a new set of social media principles. Coke have developed 10 “Principles for Online Spokespeople” which make good sense for other brands to follow.  You can read the main set below.

  1. Be Certified in the [Coca Cola] Social Media Certification Program.
  2. Follow our Code of Business Conduct and all other Company policies.
  3. Be mindful that you are representing the Company.
  4. Fully disclose your affiliation with the Company.
  5. Keep records.
  6. When in doubt, do not post.
  7. Give credit where credit is due and don’t violate others’ rights.
  8. Be responsible to your work.
  9. Remember that your local posts can have global significance.
  10. Know that the Internet is permanent.

Watch Andy’s interview with Coca Cola’s Adam Brown, on how they developed the social media principles.

    Coke’s complete policy document can be found below. At three pages, I like this a lot!


Coca Cola’s Online Social Media Principles –

Predicting Trends in 140 Characters

 

Trendsspotting posted their annual Social Media Trends Predictions earlier this week. Predicting trends is a dangerous business especially in Social Media. However, the slide deck does offer some very interesting insights from a variety of social media commentators. I have included some of the ones that I found interesting in this post.

Across many of the predictions, Trendsspotting identified the following trends that are “suggested” to influence Social Media in 2010: Mobile, Location, Transparency, Measurement, ROI, Privacy. Though, you could argue that these same trends were visible in 2009.

Pete Cashmore from Mashable predicts:

Fuelled by the ubiquity of GPS in modern smartphones – location sharing services

Geo location of our "social movements" – Twitter, Facebook, blog comment, videos that we post.

Augmented Ready – cool technology, but will it be useful?

Social gaming and virtual currencies  – Will big players seize the mobile payment opportunity?

Expect personal privacy – or rather its continued erosion to be big in 2010

David Armano – Blogger Logic and Emotion predicts:

Social media begins to look less social… more "exclusive"  – getting value, while filtering out the clutter.

Firms will look to scale and uncover cost savings by leveraging social media e.g.  Best Buy’s Twelpforce

Firms will have a social media policy  – social media to social business

Mobile becomes a social media lifeline

Sharing no longer means email – content producers will use other means to distribute their content e.g. iPhone and Android apps.

Marta Kagan – Managing Director, US Espresso Brand Infiltration predicts:

Real-time reviews will scare the pants off many a brand & foster a new ‘radical-beta’ mindset.

Tracking & Alerting" become the new searching.

Business finally admits that social media ain’t some fad for kids and B-list movie stars.

Dan Zarrella – Social & Viral Marketing Scientist Hubspot predicts:

With augmented reality and mobile social media, the real world will be important again.

Micro targeting and personalization – business will begin to leverage the wealth of data we share about ourselves to deliver individualised messages.

 

2010 will certainly bring in new applications and services, though whether they will “push the envelope” of brand engagement will yet to be seen.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s Talk @ The Water Poet – London

Yesterday evening, I attended the Gary Vaynerchuk Crush It event organised by Sprouter, at The Water Poet pub in London. Overall, Gary was on top form and shared some interesting insights with the audience.

My rough notes from the talk follow below. But I recommend that you watch the complete talk to gain all of Gary’s insights.

Consumer Expectation

– Free Shipping was once considered the greatest thing that ever happened when consumers bought online. However, 10 years later, no one cares! It has become a standard and we are used to it.

– Imagine checking into a New York based hotel and discovering that they only had dial-up internet?  You’d want to punch the concierge in the face, and pick up the phone to call home and tell someone about your bad experience. However, we have only been used to a better dial-up experience for only a few years. Our expectation of a better Internet connection in hotels has grown.

– One of the big trends to emerge in 2010 is going to be "Consumer Expectation."
Consumers will expect brands to respond to them, when consumers leave comments on a company’s Facebook wall, or when consumers send tweets to the company. They will expect a response.  Customer Service and actually "caring" will filter out contenders and bullshit artists.

– If customer service is not the backbone of the business the you are looking to build, you are going to be in trouble.

– When Amazon bought Zappos, Jeff Bezos recognised that Zappos was a threat to them and had no choice but to buy Zappos.

– Zappos will make an interesting case study for many people. It was the only company in the retail world that was a threat to Amazon. Amazon doesn’t consider companies such as Walmart, Target and Tesco as real competitors to their business.

– Zappos was a threat to Amazon, because they were beating Amazon on "DNA and culture."  Buying shoes from Zappos were not inexpensive, Amazon beat Zappos on price here. However, they ‘cared’ more about the customer.

– When you called Zappos, they trained their staff to stay on the phone with you as long as needed (to get the sale). They rewarded staff for being on the phone with you for an hour! If a dog barked in the background, and you (the person in call centre) were authentically into dogs, you were to talk about that. If you ordered a large number of shoes that didn’t fit, you could return them for free.

– All the dumb things that our grandparents did, has been lost in history. Everything you do, will be documented forever. You grand kids will know all the silly and ridiculous things that you have done. You have to pay attention to this! In the book, Gary talks about "legacy being greater than currency.”  Think life in the long term, everything is being documented forever.

– Today’s fundamental shift, is that the gatekeepers have lost their keys. The fact that anyone who is connected to the Internet gets a chance to show the world their "stuff" is a game changer. If your “stuff” is good, you can breed word of mouth.

– Today’s social web, breeds word of mouth on steroids.

– The movie Bruno flipped Hollywood on its head. Bruno opened in the States to one of the biggest openings of all time. The next day, it was one of the biggest drop off’s in cinema history. Why? Because nearly everybody who saw the film, walked out and started Facebooking, Twittering and texting that the movie was no good.  In 24 hours the word of mouth for that movie collapsed, and people didn’t go to see it.  In Hollywood, the norm used to be 3 weeks before traditional word of mouth travelled. Due to Bruno’s failure. About 75 movies got shelved this summer because of it. 

Gary makes some very interesting points about Amazon’s purchase of Zappos.  As a bonus, watch the video below which explains the corporate rationale for Amazon’s purchase in July 2009.  Also, the video does a good job to explain how Amazon’s culture compares with that of Zappos.


Chinese Social Networking Behaviour – 2009

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Picture Credit Andre Jenny

The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) recently published its “2009 Chinese Social Networking Sites User Research Report”. The report contains the results of phone surveys of Chinese Social Networking user behaviour conducted through July 2009. The report is in Chinese. However, Chinese Internet Watch has pulled some interesting data from the report, which you can read below.

  • By the end of 2009, the number of Chinese online social media users is about to reach 124 million.
  • Every social media user owns on average 2.78 social media accounts.  (Anyone have a 0.78th of an account on a social network? Smile)
  • Top 5 social networking sites: QQ alumni (50%), Renren (37%), Sina Space (36.6%), 51.com (27.1%), and Kaixin001 (26.4%).
  • The male to female ratio in SNS users is 52.9:47.1.
  • Majority of SNS users are youth (52.6%).
  • 17.8% of China SNS users’ monthly income is over RMB 3,000, higher than 13.4% Chinese netizens.
  • 47.5 of SNS users’ month income is lower than RMB 1,000, also higher than the percentage of overall Chinese netizens (44.2%).
  • 59.1% of Chinese SNS users own college degree and above, 34% higher than over Chinese netizens.
China Social Networking Sites Usage
  • Almost 80% SNS users are referred by friends, classmates, or colleagues.
  • 75.8% indicate their SNS friends are friends in real life.
  • 34.3% SNS users visit social networking sites every day while about 40.2% visit SNS once a week or longer.
  • Over half SNS users spend no longer than one hour daily on SNS sites; 26.6% between one to two hours; 12.8% over two hours.
  • China SNS users are mostly interested in status and photo album updates from friends.
  • Sending messages and uploading photos are the two most popular activities on SNS.
Which Social Networking Site to Choose?
  • 63.5% users pick the number of known friends, classmates, and colleagues on a social network as the top reason for choosing that network.
  • 32.4% users find it important to get useful information on a social network
  • Having lots of interesting topics is important to 21.4% users for choosing that social networking site
  • 18.4% find a social networking site attractive if it provides lots of online games

The primary purpose of logging in a social network is entertainment for over 42.4% users being interviewed. 27.4% just log in to play games.

Why Abandon A Social Network?
  • 31.3% users interviewed have abandoned a social network after registration. The main reasons are:
  • No interesting activities (29%)
  • No useful information (27.9%)
  • Not many friends (26.5%)
  • No common topics (24.9%)
  • No feeling of being engaged (18.3%)
China Social Networking Sites VAS
  • 40.9% SNS users would like to have mobile access and 25.6% SNS users want 3rd party payment service
  • Women are more passionate about Value Added Services (VAS) on SNS than men. 19.8% women want to trade virtual goods (men: 16.8%).
  • Men are more interested in B2C e-commerce and real goods trading.
China Social Networking Sites Advertisement
  • Acceptance to different types of ads in SNS are less than 30%. About 30.1% of users have never clicked on an ad. 39.9% users indicate they will click on an ad if it’s interesting.
  • Ads on personal profile, photo albums, and polls are more acceptable to women than men.
  • The more educated people are more likely to click on an ad.

Some interesting food for thought here. The primary purpose for logging into social networks is entertainment. Engaging content, extends to online games. Therefore, it would be interesting to see how Chinese users responds to marketing messages within games.


5 Social Media Lessons…

5 of this year’s great Social Media Books via Mashable, books definitely worth investing in.


Reflections on FOWA 2009

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FOWA Highlight Reel 2009

It’s autumn here in London, and this means it is time for the Future Of Web Apps (FOWA) conference! This year’s venue has changed from the Excel Centre to Kensington Town Hall. A smaller venue than the Excel, but much easier to get to. The Carsonified team led by Ryan Carson, put on one of the best conferences in the UK. FOWA is targeted towards Developers, Designers and Decision Makers. Though, many attendees don’t fit into any of these boxes. In this post, I offer my reflections from the event with some details of the stand out talks.

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users – Kevin Rose (Digg)

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This year’s event kicked off with Digg’s Kevin Rose, on how to take your website from one to one million users. Kevin offered ten top tips for budding web entrepreneurs on how to stroke your visitor egos, avoid analysis paralysis, attend event parties and woo key influencers and even how to hack the press (my favourite). You can watch Kevin’s keynote talk below.

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose

 

Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications – Francisco Tolmasky (280 North) 

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The next stand out talk was by Francisco Tolmasky from 280 North. Francisco talk focused on how true web applications can be used with the richness of desktop applications. 280 North has launched Cappuccino, a JavaScript framework inspired by Apple’s Objective C language. Cappuccino uses a visual development tool called Atlas Tolmasky’s featured a demo called 280 slides, a presentation web based application which was amazing. it looked superb. Take a look at 280 Slides here.

Francisco provided an interesting insight. Developers provided feedback that their companies were unwilling to trust pure web based. Therefore his company had to produce a desktop version of Atlas, which allowed the creation of local computer based applications. You can watch Francisco’s presentation below.

Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications by Francisco Tolmasky

 

 The Future of HMTL5 – Bruce Lawson (Opera)

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Bruce Lawson provided a very interesting overview of HTML 5.  In particular, how it would make life easier for developers. He demonstrated some media demos working in HTML 5 and he made two standout points during the talk:

  1. “HTML 5 is in direct competition with other technologies intended for applications deployed over the Web, in particular Flash and Silverlight”.
  2. “The web is too important to place control in the hands of any one vendor”.

Two very important points, with the latter gaining a loud applause from the FOWA audience.

Bruce’s presentation is available to watch below.

The Future of HTML5 by Bruce Lawson

 

How The Guardian is using APIs, Frameworks & Tools to Build a "Mutalised" Newspaper – Chris Thorpe (The Guardian)

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The Guardian’s Chris Thorpe delivered an interesting talk on how the Guardian newspaper looks to weave itself into the fabric of the internet, through its open platform. Chris introduced the idea of a ‘mutualised’ newspaper’, a society in which each person has the means to produce content, either individually or collectively. This journalist and the reader work together to tell the story. His presentation is available below.

Building the stacks for a mutualised newspaper

 

How People will use the Web in the Future – Aza Raskin (Mozilla)

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Aza Raskin of Mozilla, delivered a talk on the role of the browser in the future. A fundamental shift is occurring, where the  browser forms a “you-centric” view of the web. A future where the browser understands your interests, and the interests of your friends by tapping directly into your “social graph” . His talk touched also on HTML 5, in particular how tomorrow’s browser could even hold a SQL database! His talk particularly touched upon:

  1. YOU-Centric browsing
  2. How browsers will manage your identity
  3. Browsers with native natural language processing
  4. Built-in payments in browsers

You can watch Aza’s talk below.

You-Centric: The Future of Browsing

 

The Future of The Cloud – Simon Wardley

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Simon’ is an excellent orator and his talk focused on the future of the cloud. He discussed the confusion that surrounds cloud computing. Experts disagree even on the definition of it. Vendors define the cloud, as “their product”. The big surprise to me, was the number of different cloud protocols that currently exist. The situation is similar to networking protocols in the the early 1990’s, IPX/SPX vs TCP/IP. Simon ended his talk with a thought provoking point:

Either the cloud is based on open source or you’ll risk losing internet freedoms".

 Basheera Khan, formerly from TechCrunch Europe caught up with Simon after his talk. She asked him to explain exactly why tech startups need to pay attention to how vendors are shaping cloud computing frameworks and standards, and why open source is the way to go if you don’t want the rug pulled out from under your cloud-based web service. You hear Simon’s comment on the audioboo below.

Listen!

A modified version of his presentation can be seen below:

General RoundTable Cloud

View more documents from swardley.

Marketing your Web App – The Future of Brands Online – Alex Hunter

Alex Hunter discusses the DOs and DONT’s of developing a powerful and positive brand. Nothing particularly new here for people who are familiar with online brand building.

However, Alex is a great speaker and delivers his talk with passion. His talk is available to watch below.

Branding and Marketing Essentials for Your Web App by Alex Hunter from Carsonified on Vimeo.

 

The Q & A Keynote with Gary V – Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library TV)

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Watch Gary’s keynote videos below.

Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk

 

And Finally…

I made a small cameo appearance in a CNET video of FOWA with @natalidelconte. The video has some great interviews with various FOWA speakers including Kevin Rose.