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Live Blogging the Web 2.0 Expo: Social Strategy for Business #web20expo

Posted on April 23, 2008 by jessestay

Charlene Li, and Josh Bernoff are two of my favorite Social Media Experts. They published “Groundswell”, a book I strongly suggest and recommend to anyone looking to utilize social technology in their business strategy. Here are my notes:

Key roles and their Groundswell objectives:

Research

Marketing

Sales

Support

Development

Charlene talking about specific applications that accomplish these objectives:

Del Monte community, invitation only, has conversations with their customers. Del Monte asks their customers questions like, “What does your dog eat for breakfast” and gets responses back from the customers. Then, more specific questions are asked, and a conversation is started. This information is hard to measure in a focus group, but can be gathered via a Groundswell.

Now Charlene’s talking about tampons. What, don’t like the subject? Neither do most people. P&G had this same problem, and created the social network, “Being Girl”. No branding of “P&G” on the site. In articles, adds things like, “Brought to you by Always pads”.

Brides.com: Allows the bride-to-be to create a count-down calendar on their Myspace page. Widget shows the countdown, and offers a challenge to get the widget. When a user clicks to get the widget, they go to brides.com to get the widget. With widgets like this, your fans are doing the selling for you.

Starbucks: Suggestion boxes. All suggestions are public, and can be voted by the community. Management talks back to the community and responds to their feedback!

Keys to success for pragmatists:

Start with your customers

Choose an objective you can measure

Line up executive backing

Romance the naysayers

Start small, think big

Pragmatists bring companies and the groundswell together. Objectives are the key to successful social strategy. Use POST to frame your strategy. Think big, but start small.

Live Blogging the Web 2.0 Expo: Comparing Social Platforms #web20exp

Posted on April 23, 2008 by jessestay

Unfortunately I only have a Flip which gives me just 30 minutes of storage so you’ll be able to see the first 30 minutes below. I’m currently watching “Comparing Social Platforms”, with Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager for Facebook, Allen Hurff, SVP Engineering for Myspace, Jessica Alter, Dir. of Platform and Business Development for Bebo, Patrick Chanezon, Google OpenSocial Evangelist, and David Recordon, Open Platform Lead for Six Apart. It’s fascinating to see the leaders of all 4 areas, including a developer standpoint from Six Apart all talking about ways to improve the Social Graph.

I’ll continue from where the video left off:

Allen Hurff said a great point when it comes to focus on Platform Development: “I love developers, but I love users ten times more”. That’s a great point and something we need to remember, and not be too demanding on as developers. In the end it’s all about the users of our applications.

Dave Morin talked about the Causes application. If the user can’t get the message to the friends that they care about such a cause, that’s bad and needs to be taken care of. Facebook is trying to focus on this, while finding balance with Applications that perhaps aren’t as impacting to ensure they aren’t being spammy and user experience is protected.

Patrick Chanezon says Google prefers the term “organic growth” to “viral growth”. Dave Morin brought up that ultimately, creating the best product is the end goal. Those applications that just focus on Viral growth grow fast, but ultimately die out. In the end you want the best experience for the user.

Dave Morin: “A lot of the times we’ll see viral but no ‘social'”. Being able to see what your friends are doing with your application, how they interact together makes it social and not just viral.

Dave Morin: Social Commerce is the future of how people do business on the web. Working on a commerce engine for Facebook. He likes the applications that are doing virtual currencies (I agree).

David Recordon: Building applications has to be easy. Extensibility is important. It has to be easier than it is today – if more successful than today next year, technology still isn’t easy enough.

Questions:

Matt from SocialThing: will there ever be a premium model with guaranteed uptime, extended support, etc.?: Myspace says they haven’t thought of it. Facebook says they are committed to their platform – says it’s a good point and also haven’t thought of it.

How liberal are platforms going to be in sharing data?: Six Apart is one of the creators of the ATOM standard – bloggers should own their content. Facebook is committed to enabling people to take data where they want to. What exactly does “data portability” mean? Dave Morin posed that question to OpenSocial… “data portability” might not be the right word for it – “privacy portability” might be a better term for it. “It’s all about the user – it’s not about technology.”

What are the thoughts on creating an even playing field for viral channels?: Myspace will have a hard time

In conclusion it looks like the theme for this was putting focus on the users in the end vision, not the application. I’ll upload the video in a minute if it isn’t showing yet.

Me at Web 2.0 Expo

Posted on April 21, 2008 by jessestay

I’ll be at Web 2.0 Expo starting tomorrow, April 22 through Friday, April 25. This, in my opinion, is one of the conferences to be at this year, as I really feel we’re getting to a tipping point towards the evolution of Social Networks. Expect to hear a lot about Enterprise 2.0, Future of Mobile, and of course, the future of Social Networks. I’ll do my best to live-blog what I can on the Stay N’ Alive blog, OpensocialNow.com, and FacebookAdvice.com. I’ll be bringing along my wife’s Flip digital video camera so maybe I’ll even get some good video while I’m out there.

I’ll be bringing several signed copies (by both me and Jason) of “I’m on Facebook–Now What???” with me, which, if you’re a blogger and can convince me why I should give you a free copy (I love giveaways to your audience if you have a good audience) come see me. Or, if you already have a copy of the book I’m happy to sign copies while I’m there. I’ll be posting my whereabouts on Twitter so you should be able to find me. Also, look for me at the O’Reilly booth on Wednesday around 3pm. I’ll be also promoting my upcoming book, FBML Essentials and would love to meet you!

If you want to follow where I am, again, there’s Twitter, or feel free to check out my schedule here. Also, add me on Crowdvine!

Google Creating the Largest Social Network Ever

Posted on April 21, 2008 by jessestay

So many articles have come out today about the new iGoogle integration with OpenSocial and launch of the developer’s sandbox for iGoogle. I don’t think any of their headlines truly do it justice. Google has just launched something so big that, to me, should keep Facebook and MySpace up at night. This, I believe, is the item Google had up their sleeves which my source mentioned earlier.

Let’s just start with the fact that anyone can join the sandbox! Google has not given any information on if information stored on the sandbox will be deleted when they go live, but indications are that this data will remain when the sandbox goes live. This sandbox seems different than the Orkut sandbox, in that the sandbox, and the live site are one integrated environment. If you sign up for the sandbox, when you go to http://www.google.com/ig it automatically takes you to the sandbox environment every time, and not the live environment. Are you an early adopter and want access to see your friends feeds and share your profile with them? Just sign up for the Sandbox here, add the developer tools tab (Note, tabs are gone – not sure what to call it now. Also, the link in the developer docs is wrong – use the one I just posted.), and now, under “Developer Tools” you will begin seeing all your friends, you can invite new friends, and see their status updates.

Here’s what the new iGoogle Sandbox is:

Goodbye Tabs! — “Tabs” in iGoogle previously allowed you to segregate your Gadgets into different “views”, and Google even created pre-populated views such as “Finance” where they gave you all the Gadgets you needed for a particular subject. Google appears to have removed tabs in the sandbox, opting instead to put the “views” (or whatever Google will call them) into a sidebar on the left.

I mentioned on Twitter earlier that the new vision Facebook is giving us for user Profiles has a striking resemblance to iGoogle’s tabbed interface. That is all Google is doing here – they are providing a true, open, customizable environment that they have already put years into in order to create the ultimate user profile for an individual. Now Google just needs a way to allow you to determine which of the “Views” will be visible by your friends – trust me, Google has way more up their sleeve on this one. Facebook has a lot to catch up in this. Frankly, Facebook’s best strategy may remain in the walled-garden approach.

Friends from Google Reader and Gmail are now integrated in one, viral environment! — I have mentioned that Google Reader’s “Friends” integration was only the beginning for Google’s social efforts. I also argued that the API Google gives you to access Gmail Friend data is a big thing. Now, within a single environment, you can write applications that have access to these “Friends”, as well as all of your Gmail contact data. Ask it to suggest friend to you – you’ll notice it seems to be using that Gmail Contact API to retrieve your Gmail contacts and add them as friends.

Now go into your Gmail contacts – how many people are on your contacts list? I’m willing to bet that for most people it’s way more than you have in Facebook or Myspace or LinkedIn. Imagine what will happen when that entire friends list begins adding each other as friends. This is why I think Google is building the largest Social Network ever. The great thing is Google’s platform is so vast you may not even know you’re in a “Social Network”. This is what Charlene Li was mentioning when she said Social Networks of the future will be transparent.

Google Reader Profile is now easier to update and share with others — after you add the Developer Tools, you’ll notice your Google Reader Profile is now displayed and integrated for you. Where many people are using iGoogle as their Home Page of their browser, this now gives you a profile to edit, and share with others. Much of this data is available via the OpenSocial API and can be shared with others via Applications. Google is only beginning to give the user a sense of a “Profile” through this update – expect to see much more from them.

“Updates” Feed/Gadget — under Developer Tools you’ll also see a “Status Updates” Gadget. This is a slap right in the “face” of Facebook’s News Feed in that now any interactions you make in Google Reader get stored in this Gadget, and shared on your Friends’ iGoogle pages. I believe this information will also eventually be available and updateable via the OpenSocial API.

Status Updates — One cool thing I noticed is that when your “Updates” Gadget updates itself, it automatically updates a “Status” under your name in your profile. It doesn’t appear that it updates your Gmail status, but I expect that to happen in the future as well. I’d also love to see this updatable via the OpenSocial API and manually, as well.

Automatic Invitations interface for your Apps — in the upper-right of each Gadget, there is a link to “Share this Gadget”. Click on that, and you can invite your friends to add the gadget as well. This is a great viral way to start, along with the Updates Feed, but I imagine we’ll also see ways to further get into the invitations architecture via OpenSocial in the future. For now, I suggest the Google Contacts API. 🙂

Now, imagine Google Apps getting this same functionality in the future and your business being allowed to have the same access to iGoogle Gadgets – Enterprise 2.0 is knocking at our doors, my friends! Google has just given us almost all the same functionality as Facebook, in an open, not walled garden. Google has just “Checked” Facebook here I believe.

Google Gets the Discussion Going on "Templates" for OpenSocial

Posted on April 14, 2008 by jessestay

This morning an e-mail went out to the OpenSocial and Gadget Spec Mailing List for OpenSocial developers, mentioning proposed problems and a need for “Templates” in OpenSocial. For those Facebook developers out there, this could be one of the missing links in OpenSocial, replacing the benefits of FBML for Facebook.

Utah Social Media Developers Garage Has a Mailing LIst

Posted on April 11, 2008 by jessestay

I mentioned this at the Hackathon in March, but have not had the time to blog about it yet. Thus far all announcements for the Utah Social Media Developers Garage Meetings and Utah Facebook Developers Garage Meetings have been announced either through this blog, or our Facebook Group. I’ve now created a Google Group for us at http://groups.google.com/group/utsmdev. Please sign up there and I’ll issue all announcements via that list. Google Groups provides a more neutral ground in the sense that users don’t have to have an account to use it (to an extent), as compared to the Facebook groups. We’ll keep the Facebook groups around, and depending on membership I’ll still send announcements there as well, but I encourage all to sign up on the Google Group if possible. In addition, having a mailing list will allow us to have more of a discussion. This way if you are working on a project in Facebook, or OpenSocial, or even WordPress or Twitter or other APIs and you run into issues, you can ask the group and we can work together to solve the problem. I figure this way we’ll be able to all build a strong Social Media Development community here in Utah that others can rely on. Google groups will also give us a page we can tell others about the group, when the next meeting is, etc. If you have some graphics and HTML skills to help with that I am open to volunteers!

Also, I have created a Google Code repository at http://code.google.com/p/utsmdev/. For anyone okay with producing their code under the GPL, this will give you a place to store your code, and collaborate with others on the code, track issues, etc. If you want commit permissions to that repository please contact me and I’ll add you. As Google App Engine gets more integration into these things we’ll also set up a hosting option through Google App Engine to actually host your apps. Hopefully all these options will make it all much easier for everyone to get out and collaborate in their coding. It’s a good time to be a developer…

P.S. – We will continue on in our every-other-month meeting structure now, so our next meeting will be the second Tuesday in May. I’m working on a speaker, so if you know anyone or have ideas let me know!

The Reason Google Apps Engine Could be a Competitor to Facebook

Posted on April 9, 2008 by jessestay

The hype is out there and it is real. After the launch of Google Apps Engine, everyone is up in arms as to what exactly it is, and who needs to watch out. The truth is, everyone needs to watch out when Google launches something, since because of tight integration with all of their products, a slight tweak in one product could mean cross-integration between others, making it almost impossible for you to compete as a company because all of the sudden your space is being threatened by the new products.

New, Big OpenSocial Announcements Coming Tonight?

Posted on April 7, 2008 by jessestay

According to Mike Arrington (I know, I said I wanted to boycott TechCrunch but it’s just so dang hard to avoid! I’ll stick to boycotting Crunchgear for now.), Google is having another “Campfire One” event tonight. The last Campfire One event they announced OpenSocial. It was the OpenSocial team that announced the event, and the biggest bloggers and developers in the industry were all there. Mike Arrington thinks this one is going to be the announcement of “BigTable”, Google’s answer to Amazon SimpleDB.

I think otherwise – see my thoughts at OpensocialNow.com.