1 in 4 People On Social Networks

One out of four online users are visiting social networking sites. This, according to a survey conducted by the Consumer Internet Barometer which is being reported on by MarketingVox. Such a high number is a testament to the popularity of sites such as MySpace and Facebook. This also suggests that "Online social networking is an integral part of many people’s lives and a natural extension of our means of communication which the internet has created. The next growth wave will be expanding and incorporating these networks into our business lives,” according to Lynn Franco, Director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center.

Some of the findings of the report were:

• About half of social networkers visit social-networks sites on a daily basis - and half of them (or roughly a quarter of all social networkers) say they log on several times a day.
• Among household members, those age 12-17 are more likely than their siblings to be daily users, with 57% saying they frequent social networking sites at least once a day.
• Most users - more than three quarters - log onto social networking sites from home, but users also log on at work, school, and public places throughout the day.
• Women are more likely to frequent social networking sites than men; in general, women use the internet more than men for personal communication.
  

Don Ryan, VP of Technology and Media at TNS, said social networking sites are integral to the new media mix: "As social networking becomes a staple in people’s media experience, brands will place it alongside print, TV and search as a main advertising vehicle."

Auto Industry Social Networking

Despite the complications, "Social Networking" has become the key new online mantra for major players. Jeremiah Owyang has a list of several auto company campaigns that sought to tap into the power of social networking:
Chevy Tahoe “Create you ad” - 2006
GM launches a Community program
Chrysler Blog -2008
Jeep’s Patriot Adventure: Choose your own Adventure -2008
Toyota: Master of Africa -2008
BMW 1 Series Graffiti Facebook campaign -2008

Another Social Network Bites The Dust

Yet another social networking site you've probably never heard of is - alas - shutting down. Following in the footsteps of Conde Nast and Verizon's social networking communities, Monster.com's personal networking community site, Tickle, is closing it's doors. The company provides interpersonal content and services (self-discovery, matchmaking, career and social networking).

Silicon Alley Insider is reporting the story. Tickle apparently sent this email out to its 17 million members:

We will be shutting down Tickle as of June 30th 2008. You will no longer be able to access your saved test results after that date. If you would like to keep your test results, please print them out before that date. Many thanks for your understanding! ... There is no action required from your side, you don't have to delete your user account or cancel your subscription; Tickle will do this for you.

It appears that everyone is tickled out. Take a final gander:

Online Shoppers To eTailers: I Want My Web 2.0

In a survey conducted by Guidance and Synovate, in which they asked respondents: “When thinking about shopping online, what is most likely to make you return to a given shopping website?”, they found that 60% of people are drawn to online retailers with Web 2.0 tools and technologies. And of the respondents, they found that:

- 34% will return to sites that offer product and service recommendations. The majority, 41%, of the social web gen in the 18-24 age group were more prone to this than the boomer 55-64 age group.
- 26% will return to sites that provide an unique shopping experience. Those with post-grad education and non-whites seemed to prefer this.
- 18% will return to sites that value and allow for feedback submission. The older age groups were found to be more likely to provide feedback. Non-whites as well seemed to value this option.
- 16% will return to sites that welcome them. More women than men were statistically inclined to this and more people in the lowest income range.
- 6% will return to sites that make them feel part of a community. So, the social networking component of online shopping is a valuable component that can serve to drive sales.

“The economy is fragile and the competition for the consumer dollar is fierce, but as these findings make abundantly clear, online commerce is now a two-way street - and retailers need to embrace that reality. Online consumers and merchants are in dialogue as never before, and consumers are counting on each other for insights in making purchase decisions. Recommendations have become the new currency of online commerce, along with their corollary, the opportunity to give feedback to the e-Commerce site.” - Jason Meugniot, Guidance President and CEO.

Social Networking and Mobile

Two recent studies indicate how social networking over mobile devices is going to grow into one of the online world's most significant activities.

Opera's research about the use of their mobile browser is a bit misleading however because it appears to be from those who use the browser on their phones - obviously a group much more likely than others to participate in social networking:

Select global highlights from the first quarter report:

Social networking consumes almost 41% of traffic: The United States, South Africa and Indonesia have more than 60% of their traffic going to social networks.

More than 11.9 million people used Opera Mini in March to browse 2.4 billion pages. Thus far, more than 44 million cumulative users have tried Opera Mini.

Those 11.9 million people generate more than 33 million MB of data traffic for operators worldwide.

One Web will triumph over WAP content: Full Web surfing comprises more than 77% of all traffic. WAP content still generates the remaining 23% of traffic. WAP percentages have declined somewhat as more consumers realize Opera Mini can access rich Web content.

Neilsen has a far more statistically valid approach to answering the question of how mobile and social will intersect. Their study shows that only 1.6% of US mobile users access social networking online but note that this represents over 4,000,000 mobile users and that:

A growing number of mobile phone subscribers worldwide are taking online social networking to the streets...

Even with some indications that Facebook traffic has levelled off it remains clear that social networking will remain profoundly important in the online world, and that mobile access will increase to the point it becomes the way most people will access the internet around the world. The importance of this intersection of social and mobile cannot be overestimated.

MySpace Suicide: Who's at Fault?

There is a lot of concern in the online and offline community about the recent court decision to hold a woman accountable for the suicide death of a teenager after the woman used Myspace to mentally harass the teen.

The woman's daughter had been friends with the girl but after the two girls had a falling out the mom opened a myspace account and spoofed a teen boy identity for herself. She then befriended and later rejected the teen who, already suffering from depression, killed herself.

As with many other high profile online harassment cases it is important to realize that cases like this are not so much a product of the online community but are a product of humans behaving badly. Social networks don't kill people, people kill people. Still, there are community responsibilities that are neglected by all the major online social networks and most of the participants in those networks. Myspace and Facebook have only trivial age verification procedures. For example an enormous number of Myspace accounts show an age of "99" for members who are obviously teenagers. Myspace is reluctant to police age much if at all, partly because it opens up more lucrative advertising avenues for the site and partly because it would impact their membership negatively.

There is no way to guarantee that social networks won't be abused by a small number of participants, but there are lots of ways that communities can do a better job of policing themselves. Sooner is better than later because the legal remedies will wind up curtailing the rights of the good players along with the bad.

Image: LA Times

Yelping For Your Business

Yelp is a popular review and social networking site in the Bay Area. Yelp also covers other regions but my understanding is that they've had limited traction outside of the Silicon
Valley Heartland, partly because Yelp's strategy is to bring people together in reality as well as online through Yelp parties. Although I think blending reality and online worlds is a clever idea, the labor intensiveness of real parties may limit Yelp's ability to grow in the explosive way that other social networks can, unhindered by real world limitations.

What is clear is that Yelp can help or harm the businesses that people are reviewing. Yelp has launched "Yelp for Business" which will allow businesses to create their own dialog on the website. In my view this is a great approach rather than heavy moderation of comments which can distort the natural dialog. Unfortunately people will often rant unfairly or opportunistically about other businesses, but this should give those businesses a better opportunity to enter the dialog and correct misperceptions.

There will still be unfair challenges for reviewed businesses, however. A common marketing tactic is to criticize competitors and praise others based not on merit but on who hired the most aggressive online marketing team or - in an even more subtle form of bias - who has been the most persuasive at having happy customers leave comments at social networking sites like Yelp. For example a clever Bed and Breakfast might "invite" happy customers to leave favorable feedback at sites they have bookmarked on the computer they have for their guests while guests who are unhappy are simply not directed to do so. This is a form of "white hat" marketing that does not break any rules, but also does not present a high order picture of the establishment.

The Twitter Scaling Storm

Twitter quickly moved from internet obscurity to one of a handful of key online social media players. Past concerns over Twitter's infrastructure and reliability came to a head this week as key Twitter IT architect Blain Cook has left the company amid a swirl of blog commentary and criticism over his performance at the company.

As Matt Ingram notes in his reasonable take on things, it is ironic that Cook will be speaking soon at a Web 2.0 conference in Silicon Valley about how to scale up large online applications.

I'm a big fan of Twitter but unlike many of my tech friends I am not obsessed with it. I think many Twitter critics have really overreacted to the downtime and slowness because ... overreacting to modest tech defects is what tech people love to do.

My take is that people are not reasonably factoring profitability issues into the Twitter equation. Cook is getting more blame than he deserves because he probably was tasked with keeping things going less than the budget you'd have with a more profitable enterprise.

Twitter has been wildly successful in terms of traffic and adoption, but it has not been monetizing that success. Scaling up to an extremely robust infrastructure could be throwing good money after ... no money. Many bubble companies developed huge and robust architectures to handle trivial traffic and thus I am not at all convinced Twitter is wrong to set their priorities as they appear to have done - a great service with a second class infrastructure until they figure out how to turn a buck from all the Twitterers.

A Penny For Your Pageview: The Profit Potential of Social Applications

As social applications like Facebook, Myspace, Ning, and dozens of others attain sky high valuations few are focusing much attention on how poorly most of these social networking sites monetize their enormous traffic levels.

Microsoft's Emerging Business guru Don Dodge, in an excellent post about Social Networking, notes an example where a Facebook application only manages to generate $6,000 to $15,000 per month revenue with page views of .... wait for it .... three hundred million per month. This disparity is so great I'm wondering a bit about his source for those numbers, but it is certainly clear that social media monetization is no walk in the PPC park.

Google's dominance in the very lucrative search pay per click market has made Google the global online advertising leader in terms of advertising traffic and advertising revenue. Despite this success, even Google has been failing to find another holy grail. YouTube may eventually justify its huge valuation in indirect ways, but it does not appear to be a very healthy way to capture revenue for Google or for affiliated video publishers.

Likewise Facebook's key advertising revenue has come somewhat indirectly - from a guaranteed advertising deal with Microsoft rather than from clever internal advertising schemes like Beacon, which practically blew up in Facebooks ... own Face when issues were raised over privacy and potential misuses of Facebook user account information.

People, and certainly the advertising market, are still adapting to social networking so it is too early to know if social networking will prove to be as fertile a ground for advertisers as search. What is clear is that not much revenue is growing there yet.

UK Judge: Facebook Friends Are Not Real Friends

A judge in the UK has "settled" what many of us have wondered for some time - are Facebook friends real friends, even though you often don't really know the person?

No, said the judge in a case where a woman argued that she was being harrassed by her ex-boyfriend's friend requests on Facebook.

The Syndey Morning Herald noted:

... the magistrate accepted his argument that the contact was highly innocuous because being "Facebook friends" could not be defined as "friendship in the traditional sense".

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

The best Facebook advice I had was from Robert Scoble who suggested to me some time ago that a friend on a social networking site was whatever you wanted them to be. I loosened up my approval and invite process thanks to that invite and it has led to some excellent contacts I might not have made if I'd waited to actually meet all those "Friends" at a conference.

Will You Listen To Your Apple iPod If It Is Saying You Are Overweight?

A series of patents filed by Apple Computer today, and uncovered by Apple Insider, suggest that Apple is working on enhancements to the iPod to make is a "lifestyle" companion. Based on the patents Apple appears to be working on ways to have the iPod monitor the health and exercise of the user via new programming and new peripheral monitoring devices that may attach to the body or use motion detection to keep track of walking and other exercise routines.

Although lifestyle contraptions are nothing new, Apple appears to have some clever social networking ideas up it's virtual sleeve as well. For example one module will allow users to challenge others to competitions:

"A rewards system of the present invention also can permit a user to challenge one or more users to a competition. Based on data about the competitors' activities and user-defined allocation parameters, the rewards system can automatically distribute rewards to the user account(s) of victorious competitor(s)."

This social networking aspect of the new Apple system could be a milestone in using online social networking for health purposes, though it remains to be seen if building online health relationships will really lead most to health and happiness.

Social Media Application Smackdown

This excellent article over at Internet Duct Tape has reviewed data from the explosively popular social sharing application Friendfeed to determine the most popular Social Media applications. Although this Friendfeed sample has some challenges this is probably a great snapshot of social media application use among many early adopters in the US technology crowd, and thus offers a lot of insight into what is hot and what is not in terms of social media:

Two interesting findings:

90% of the Friend Feed participation comes from the top 8 services (Twitter, Blog, Google Reader, del.icio.us, Digg, Tumblr, YouTube, StumbleUpon). 46% of that comes from Twitter. It’s not surprising that Twitter leads the pack, because the nature of the service makes it easy to update many times a day.

The bottom 12 services (not include the ones added this week) can’t even manage to scrape 1% of the total between them (Pandora, Ma.gnolia, Upcoming, Picasa, iLike, Google Shared, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Furl, Yelp, Zooomr, SmugMug).

The author suggests that the maximum number of social media applications a person will use is about six, and that the consolidation of social applications provided by Friendfeed make it a very powerful application.

I'd suggest we are still in a very transitory mode with social media, where the holy grail has yet to be found that will provide simple, broad, fast, and efficient social and data networking across almost all applications and hardware platforms.

Bebo Sale: Who pays the piper?

Writing in the New York Times, songwriter Billy Bragg raises several important questions about money and music in the context of the sale of music-focused social networking site Bebo, which was recently purchased by Time Warner for $850 million.

As we noted yesterday discussing how dividing Facebook revenues amongst all the participants in that social network would yield very little to each person, it is important to put some of these big money deals in context.

I am totally in agreement with those that suggest the "right answer" is to find ways to bring the content producers into the equation by giving them equity stakes in the projects they help to build. However it is also important to understand the needs of investors who have little incentive to pump cash into projects unless their equity stake is reasonably in line with the investment.

Rightly or wrongly, music is cheap and money is expensive, so it is not reasonable to expect venture capital to flow unless equity is delivered. Of course in the case of Bebo the founders reaped the giant money and their main contribution was the *idea and excellent implementation" of a musical social community. How do you value that idea compared to the value of the musical contributions?

Bragg writes:

The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.

Yes, a dividend but no, this is not like investment of capital. Even if the online company fails (and most do fail), the musicians get something of value which is distribution and promotion of their work. Since they don't give up their rights to pull the work and move on to greener pastures (or more importantly promote themselves at all networks all the time), their is effectively zero risk to the musicians in these equations. Risk lies at the heart of what makes investment equations difficult, so generally as you eliminate the risk you must reduce the rewards if you want to maintain a successful business ecosystem.

The claim that sites such as MySpace and Bebo are doing us a favor by promoting our work is disingenuous. Radio stations also promote our work, but they pay us a royalty that recognizes our contribution to their business. Why should that not apply to the Internet, too?

Not disingenuous, but probably incomplete to suggest that exposure is all the artist should get. Royalties should be integrated into the risk and reward equation we are talking about above. This isn't about fairness as much as it is about creating systems that can work to deliver the goods to people. Without that, nobody will make any money.

I think Bragg's point here about compensation is basically valid. The best models will find a way to get money flowing to artists in proportion to their contribution to the social network. Given that music consumers are the big winners in the current system through free downloads both legal and illegal, I think it would be optimal to find better ways for musical consumers to pitch more cash into the social networking equation, perhaps in exchange for greater social networking privileges such as insider interactions with the artists, pre-release music, and more.

What social networking features would get you to happily pay more for your music?

Bebo Financials

Today's big news is AOL's acquisition of Social Network Bebo for a cool $850 million. Kara Swisher has an excellent piece detailing some of the financial aspects of this mega-deal. She also notes that despite some significant success in the space, Bebo is very much in the shadow of Myspace and Facebook as a social network.

With only $5 million in EBITA for 2007, Bebo is selling at a whopping 160+ times earnings. Big companies tend to do be viewed more favorably than small ones by this EBITA multiple metric, but it is notable that with small and moderate sized website dealings one would expect to pay only about one or two times annual earnings rather than paying in the tens or in this case over one hundred times annual earnings.

This discrepancy is in part due to the fact that large sites are arguably more stable than small ones, but in my opinion this is still a very conspicuous aspect of wheeling and dealing with online companies, and arguably yet another indication that internet bubble two may be ... growing ever larger.

One has to be middle aged to remember when AOL was pretty much the *only* big game in town in terms of online socializing, and I'm sure AOL execs are wishing they had managed to turn more of that early chat room activity and idle banter into a thriving social network like Myspace or Facebook or Bebo.

Can Bebo help AOL regain the former glory it enjoyed in the early days of online activity?

Social Networking Report Hijacked By Scammers

Compete.com's report on Top Social Networking Sites for February 2008 shows Fubar.com was the fastest growning social networking site. The site has grown 3,272,217% in 12 months. As a result of this report the site is getting tremendous publicity and the founders/operators are knocking on the doors of venture capitalists using the Compete report and others as validation.



Fubar.com launched as Lostcherry.com in 2006. The site ramped up to about 200,000 users by October and then changed the name to Cherrytap.com. After changing the name to Cherrytap.com the company embarked on a public relations campaign promoting Cherrytap.com as a new site that grew from zero to 200,000 users instantly.

Later, Cherrytap.com changed its name to Fubar.com. Fubar’s founder/operators have again embarked on a campaign promoting the site to venture capitalists and PR agencies saying Fubar.com is a new site that has grown from zero to 200,000 users.

Hopefully no VC will put money into this and tell us that it is the next MySpace killer. Facebook was touted as a MySpace killer after Benchmark poured money into the company. Eventually they discovered that they would need a ton more money to compete with MySpace. Then it was spun in such a way that Microsoft fell for it and invested $240M last year. See: Ballmer - Facebook Not A Mistake

Thanks to a WebGuild member Val D'Souza, CEO, PictureTrail for pointing this out.

Hidden Power of Online Forums As A Marketing Tool

I was at the Opsource SaaS Summit today and sat in on a preso from the Lithium SVP, Amy Lewis, who talked about the value of online forums to companies. Some of the key points were as follows.

Why have an online forum:

• Forum-ize your product line as part of your Web 2.0 marketing
  
• Forums can be used for customer support as well as for marketing
• Building a forum allows you to identify who your super users and because they are passionate, they represent a critical user group, a tribal base that are influencers.
• Consumer groundswell can be positive or negative which a forum can help manage. As a vendor, a forum allows you to be involved and make it a two-way dialogue and manage conversations happening on the blogosphere otherwise outside of your control.
• Communities can provide a powerful real-time vehicle:
• enhancing customer care
• enhancing brand loyalty
• providing support provided by users to users
• content is raw and unfiltered
• immediacy of great info
• value of having users talk to each other eg. customers share workarounds
• foster demand generation
• can serve as an online focus group eg. an setup private communities to help with product design
• value of happy comments being viewed by many users has a nice halo effect for branding
• professionalism and tone of forums have improved. Forum moderator should respond where appropriate and establish rules of conduct.
  
• ROI on support forums is a great place to start eg. call deflection
• suppport forum helps to build up critical mass
• lot to learn from customers

Social Network Usage Worldwide

The above chart identifies the leading social networks in selected high use countries worldwide. The chart shows the number of hours (in millions) users spent on social networks. Recent reports suggest that users are spending less time on social networks as a result of being bombarded by ads. However, the average time spent on Facebook continues to increase unabated, according to Hitwise. It stands at 21 minutes, 22 seconds (for the week ended Feb. 23) - 73% more than a year earlier. This is despite the fact that Facebook's market share of visits has dropped 27% from it peak reached in the week ended Dec. 29, 2007. According to the chart the top network by country were;

1. U.S. - MySpace
2. Canada - Facebook
3. India - Orkut
4. Japan - Mixi
5. Korea - Cyworld
6. Philipines - Friendster
7. Russia - Live Journal
8. Brazil - Orkut
9. Argentina - Metroflog
10. Portugal - Hi5
11. France - Skyblog
12. Ireland - Bebo

The Social Graph API & Privacy Says Expert

David Recordon of SixApart has a great post on Google's Social Search API and some of the privacy issues associated with it. He co-authored “Thoughts on the Social Graph” with Brad Fitzpatrick (who joined Google last August to develop the API).

Last August David started developing an open source service that would crawl online relationship data and expose it via an API. He showed snippets of it on his blog (pictures and text), and also gave a brief demo at the Data Sharing Summit. He goes on to say, "We even came close to releasing an online tool which visualized all of your accounts and friends; instead we opted for demonstrating its power with a screencast showing how you could use it to find your friends. While this implementation of the API was based on publicly discoverable information (like Google’s), we simply didn’t feel comfortable shipping that project based on current implementations. More>>

Digg Makes Well Intentioned Changes But More Needs To Be Done

Today came a post in Kevin Rose's blog notifying users of Digg's change in its algorithm. The main change is that it will now take into account voting patterns and will promote stories to the main page (a really valuable web real estate) depending on "diversity of voters who have voted for the story". What this essentially means is that, firstly, stories will take longer time or more Diggs to make it to the front page. For instance, a few days ago stories with a Digg count of 60-70 often made it to the front page while there were instances of stories with 145 Diggs still present in the upcoming section. Secondly, and more importantly, it is an effort on the part of Digg to lessen the influence of top diggers in its community who presently contribute at least 10% of articles that make it to main page of Digg. Each of the top users have a fan following on Digg and their stories automatically get 70-80 diggs and they receive a boost over new joinees in terms of stories they want to submit. This change aims to make Digg a level playing field for old powerful users and new users.

This step of course hasn't gone well with top users with many crying foul over how this algorithm change suggests that top digg users are gaming digg. In the words of Derek, a power user on digg:

"I was quite surprised by Kevin's announcement. Personally I thought all the controversy was a bunch of hot air. It all started because a user by the name of digitalgopher stayed home sick from work a couple days ago and spent the day submitting even more awesome content to Digg then usual. Naturally, this resulted in a lot more of his stories being promoted to the front page than usual that day. This caused a couple of users to panic and before you know it we have people calling for the heads of the top 100 users."

And obviously top users are upset, since this algorithm directly hits on their well earned reputation and fan following. Also, it is taking longer for stories to make it to main page which make them cry about good missed content. Visit this site and you will notice concerns that many people have with digg and which has been inflated with algorithm changes. The situation went so bad that Kevin and Jay, its founders had to talk to top digg users in an attempt to quell their fears. Note that its users have already been upset with digg about issues like banning of accounts without any reason and digg not replying to mails that are sent to them.

However, I think that in one respect that what Digg really needs to change is in terms of transparency. Users want to know if there is a feature called "Auto-Bury List" in digg which automatically buries stories that belong to particular URLs. Kevin and Jay have mainly avoided this question till now. Also in question are digg editors who scan stories and bury which seems inappropriate to them. These features are not necesserily negative, but the problem is the lack of transparency and digg users being kept out of loop. Digg should remember that many users submit stories to digg because they feel themselves to be part of the digg community as contributors. If they are kept out of the loop and their account banned due to TOS violation without giving any reason/warning to them, these users will tend to go look for other options. I had noted in an article about top social media sites that many digg users have left to join mixx, another social voting site with richer facilities than digg. What digg must remember that its value lies only in its community of contributors and thus be nicer and open with them. Many of the users there contribute because they love digg and digg should also love them back so that good stories keep coming in.

Second Keynote Speaker For Conference - Craig Newmark, Craigslist Founder

Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist will be the second headline Keynote Speaker at the upcoming WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference & Expo on Tuesday, January 29, 2008.

We all know Craigslist which is described as a centralized network of online communities, featuring free classified advertisements (with jobs, internships, housing, personals, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs, resume, and pets categories) and forums on various topics. Craig, himself, is a web-oriented software engineer by training, with 30 years of IT experience at companies such as IBM and Bank of America, Craig now spends his days working as a customer service rep at Craigslist.

In 1995 while Craig was working at Schwab, he started craigslist as an email list for friends and co-workers about events going on in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1999, Craig retired from IT consulting to work full-time on Craigslist. What started as a fun side project in Craig's living room has since grown into one of the busiest sites on the internet, helping people with basic day-to-day needs such as finding a job, an apartment and a date, all within a culture of trust. Craig continues to embrace his inner nerd though he no longer wears thick black glasses that are held together with tape, and he retired the plastic pocket protector some years ago.

Craig is involved with a variety of community efforts and is particularly interested in organizations promoting public diplomacy, mideast peace and new forms of media such as participatory journalism. He's on the boards of Sunlight Foundation, OneVoice, FactCheckED, and VotoLatino. Craig graduated from Case Western University.

Don't miss his keynote! Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia will be the first Keynote.

Social Networks: New Age Solution to Problems of the Old Economy

I'm a curmudgeon, a hard headed analyst. I compete with much larger agencies to help companies find alternative product strategies when first efforts are running out of steam. I point out weaknesses and overlooked opportunities, find partners, and debunk shoddy market volume figures proffered by staff in order to keep projects funded, or to justify their existence of such. My advice is often ignored - until much later after my contract is long over. That's when they dredge up my reports and presentations and go over them with a highlighter.

Strategies for Social Media, in particular, have been a challenge when soft pedaling my services in the outreach phase. Companies want to just jump in and create systems from whole cloth, offer white box services, or create Facebook apps - all without a thought as to what interactions they are trying to foster, who they are endeavoring to connect or enable, or what model they are trying to exploit. Forget any reality checks for monetization, even in the soft sense of labor savings or process streamlining.

No, when an organization has made up its mind, the strategic issues are often put aside, and the project proceeds apace to implementation. Bad for me, good for the latest crop of Social Media systems designers; all power to them. We will see how it shakes out, long term.

But I am a staunch advocate of applying New Age solutions to Old Economy problems.

My first exposure to the notion of Social Networks, Blogs, FOAF, Tags, and the like, was from a true visionary, way back in 2004. Kingsley Idehen, CEO of the under-reported and under appreciated OpenLink Software. Kingsley is a genius and a technological powerhouse, while Virtuoso Universal Server beats other web databases and middleware hands down, not to mention OpenLink Data Spaces as the solid outcome of social media, semantic web enabling technologies that properly leverage the power of Virtuoso.

The foregoing was not a shameful plug for a respected colleague, but an introduction to the idea that new solutions should be prime fodder for old problems. Kingsley understands this and he helped me to understand this paradigm when it was still a very fresh and not well understood concept. This was years before Facebook.

I approached OpenLink about a problem and opportunity in the independent automotive trades such as towing and mobile locksmithing. The background of the problem is interesting, and is my obsession regarding extended efforts to fund it as a venture or project, but the real message here is as follows:

1. Long before the buzz, social networks existed as natural, self-evolving ecosystems in the service sector - product service, skilled trades, artisans, professional services.
   


2. The mad rush to 'horizontalize' and 'advert-monetize' Facebook style systems is fine, but is diverting much well deserved attention from these mature markets which are models of living networks of social relationships.
   


3. As much as I hate the terms Web10 and Web20, I have to admit that there is a real difference to be appreciated in the technology that might have served in the 1999-2004 time frame and now.
   


4. The back end has matured, the front end is richer, the mobile tools repertoire is altogether fresh and virtually unrecognizable from a few years ago.
   


5. Some things the pundits totally missed: AppXchange, others, the sure and steady migration of what once were enterprise only tools to free and inexpensive platforms -
   


6. Open Source moves to mainstream; Google releases a fully fledged Mobile OS.
   

All of the above ripens the environment for preexisting social networks to amplify their models using technology that is becoming almost ubiquitous. What's holding them back is the lack of interest in the blue collar trades that soldier on without new economy advocates to give them true social networks of the Web20 and Web30 (whatever that is) world.

Shall we take an example of the old economy that has been overlooked by the frenzied evangelists of social networking?

Where to start?
Shall we say, free-lance dispatching for independent towing, mobile glass installers, and mobile locksmiths? Ah...yes:

As outlined in the ThruDispatch pitch slides, the social model for the independent automotive trades is a 'native social model'. Independent towing owner / operators use a natural itinerant model to visit external agencies, such as police departments, parking lots, auto dealers, car auctions, etc.

These weary pilgrims wend their way through their local area, seeking to add clients to their work slate. They bank on their network to call them and requests towing (or locksmithing or auto glass repair), on an as needed basis. They have no intelligent work-flow. They might be heading in the wrong direction when a new job comes in. They are not exploiting the best that mobile technology could offer them.

Along with the, 'just visiting' model, itinerant mobile service workers are subject to external preemption, where casually affiliated agencies may use an alternate provider, gather lists of allied trade acquaintances, and join in the general free-for-all that is the independent services trade. It's a game of churn, and often the best candidate (selected for proximity, reputation, or capacity), is never considered due to the opacity of the model.

How would a social networking model preserve the best of the status quo for itinerant mobile services, while extending and enabling better visibility to enhance job/ price matching, and optimize work flow for both the job submitters and those who execute them?

Here are some ideas covered in greater detail in the ThruDispatch plan:

• Multi-Cast open jobs with cost and time parameters to a sub selection of geographically appropriate mobile subscribers
  


• Create a pre-execution view (for job submitter) of all possible job executors, with their ratings and merit figures
  


• Create a 'Virtual Dispatcher" that monitors the progress of jobs in the execution queue, so that non-progessing jobs can be withdrawn and re-assigned, or so that escalating levels of alert reminders can be sent to keep the original executor on track.
  


• Allow overlays and applications that take the basic fleet model, and extend it to include the composition of virtual fleets, made up of many independents.
  


• Allow for the placement of blocks of future job orders that can bid on at a discount, in exchange for demand predictability, and payment advances that are carried by the portal operators, or external financiers.
  
  This is a start, and a long article already. Next time - more on the actual model of interactions between job submitters and executors.
  

If the new age social networks, VC's, and mobile platform providers would give this model the time of day regarding partnerships or funding, this cohort of 3.5 million lone wolves would be worth $20 a month in per subscriber fees, additional revenue from handling their billing through card services, and other lucrative channels. What's the hangup?

Written and submitted by Alan Wilensky.

Social Media and Teens

Not super surprising that the web is the newest hangout for teens. According to a study "Teens & Social Media" conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project "some 93% of teens use the internet, and more of them than ever are treating it as a venue for social interaction – a place where they can share creations, tell stories, and interact with others." What is interesting, however, are the trends being reported on teens' usage patterns online.

The use of social media – from blogging to online social networking to creation of all kinds of digital material – is central to many teenagers' lives.

39% of of teens online between the ages of 12-17 share photos, videos, and stories online and approximately 30% either work on a webpage or blog for someone or have their own, up roughly 20% from 2004. The number of teen bloggers nearly doubled from 2004 to 2006 with girls dominating the blogospere at 35% versus 20% of online teen boys. This could be attributed to girls tending to be a little more communicative and expressive than boys. A whopping 55% have created a MySpace or Facebook profile and there is evidence to suggest a direct correlation between teens with social networking profiles and blogging. Many of these teens also tend to be bloggers, read blogs, and comment on blogs.

57% of online teens watch videos online but boys trump girls in watching and posting videos online. Although photos and videos are an important part of teens' lives online, most reported restricting access to their photos and the majority report receiving comments on their photos and videos.

Communications patterns for teens are shifting for "multi-channel teens – those teens who use the internet, instant messaging, text messaging a cell phone, and social networking sites" to cell phones, IM apps, and social networks. And, compared to adults, teens are least likely to use email as a means of communicating, opting instead for texting, IM, and social networks to keep in touch with friends.

This data validates what we've all been seeing which is the growing popularity and demand for Web 2.0 phenomena such as user-generated content in the form of blogs, photos, and videos, and for social networking communities.

Cisco Out To Lunch on Social Networking

Cisco’s social networking strategy is to help media companies connect with their customers. Cisco’s offerings will deliver multimedia content to online communities, help visitors find content through a recommendation and relevance engine that looks at a user's activity patterns and makes personalized suggestions, said Dan Scheinman, SVP Media Solutions. The strategy is predicated on the notion that due to information explosion:

1) Users’ often don't even know what they're looking for;

2) Finding anything in this world of infinite information is really going to be tricky; and

3) Cisco's network expertise and recent social-networking acquisitions uniquely equip it to solve this set of problems.

"We've become the only company that can do all of these three things together," Scheinman said.

Users’ often don't even know what they're looking for. Oh really! Do the millions of users on social networking sites not EVEN know what they want? Is that why they are spending so much time on social networks - because they don’t know what they want?

Users are finding it tricky to find content. Has Dan Scheinman not heard of Google? If not, let me quickly explain. Google is a web site where you can go and enter your search query, click the video link, and find exactly the video you are looking for. It will find the content you are looking for regardless of where it resides. The content does not have to be on your web site.

Cisco is the only company that can do all of these three things together. Wow! Have you NOT heard of YouTube? They do that and more, and they do it for free. Cisco recently acquired Five Across and Tribe.net, both dogs in the social media space. Five Across, was a blogging site founded by folks that did not blog but were looking to make a quick buck. Tribe.net was a site for burning man fans with good intentions but backed by evil doers (Mayfield) looking to make a quick buck. The evil doers finally gave up on the site after talks with NBC failed and an acquisition bid by burning man fans fell through. Finally, Cisco revealed that it had acquired the site for its cutting edge technology such as photo uploading and inviting friends.

If you are responsible for social media strategy for a major corporate web site or a small internet community you can save yourself a lot of money, time, and frustration by simply using YouTube. It is free and easy to use. You can easily upload your videos, integrate them into your web site, track subscriptions, get viewer analytics, and more. If you want to customize it, you can use their API and if you want to customize further, you can use their YouTube Director which has many more options for professional users such as logo customization and scheduling show times etc. In fact, UC Berkeley uses this service.

This is in no way an endorsement of YouTube's offering but information so that you don't end up blowing $250,000 when you can get the same thing for free.

Online Wisdom Coming In A New Flavor?

Wikipedia has become one of the most authoritative sources of information online or offline. Part of Wikipedia's enormous success has been thanks to the prominent placement Wikipedia has enjoyed at Google, often in the top few listings for common, highly competitive terms.

Today, Google announced a new project that may become even more popular as a source of authoritative information, currently nicknamed the knol project.

Knol is a unique information experiement in that it will create an authoritative article about any topic and then allow feedback and comments from the community. I'm not clear how initial authority to write these will be determined, but I'm guessing Google's academic orientation will show here and they'll very appropriately require some form of academic, literary, or business credential before allowing people to post on topics.

The web has only begun to scratch the power of community as an arbiter of quality. Digg uses voting, while Wikipedia uses a group editing model. It appears knol will offer voting and the ability to add to the article, though not change it.

Social Networking Gets a Suit and Tie

It's no secret that Social Networking is growing. In 2006 over half of B2B technology buyers visited social networking sites (2006 comScore World Metrix). The top business players in the space are LinkedIn and Plaxo and they are driving demand by delivering consistent product enhancements:

LinkedIn's Half Open Platform
LinkedIn will be opening their nework to "allow developers to build applications that run inside your LinkedIn account (via OpenSocial) and the far more useful and interesting part — ways to pull your LinkedIn data out and use it elsewhere."

What I like about their approach is that they are sticking to their roots. They are a 'professional network' so rather than taking the Facebook 'apps gone wild' approach, LinkedIn will be keeping tabs on the applications it allows on its network. What does this mean? You won't have to worry about hamburger fights and karate-chops.

Plaxo vs. Flock
I wrote about Flock in an earlier post - you know, the Social Media Web Browser. Well Plaxo (with it's Plaxo Pulse feed aggregator feature) has a different approach to keep you connected to all of your social networks. They've announced a new Outlook connector - being that Outlook is primarily a business application you can guess who this is built for (yet more proof point that Social Networking is not just for friends and teenagers). What's cool is that it's embedded into the what is still the primary communication tool in business - email. Enabling you to 'get a pulse' on your contact before sending them an email will make your message more meaningful therefore deepening your relationship with that contact. Are you ready to give your Outlook a pulse?

Marketing with Facebook

Still not convinced about the uptake of social networking? According to Alexa metrics, half of the top 10 sites in the world are social networking sites including YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Hi5 and Orkut.


I think Facebook offers a huge potential when it come to marketing. One out of 7 web visitors went to Facebook in the month of August. Some companies already see the value of Facebook and use it as a way to communicate to customers (like a new kind of email). However this seems to make the most sense for B2C customers - this is what I'm told. Although I agree that B2C companies have the most to gain I don't think it's a channel that B2B customers want to rule out.

First off, let's get over the myth that Facebook is for college kids. Not anymore! Over half (56%) of Facebook users are over 25 and 45% of those are over 35! They are likely to be college educated and employed with mid-level management positions. They may not be your decision makers but they certainly are influencers. Therefore shouldn't you be talking to these people? With such a low barrier to entry (free account set-up) - what do you have to lose, besides a little time being social?

Okay, so if you're ready to take the red pill, this presentation from Charlene Li of Forrester provides additional demographics, case studies and best practices for marketers.

Nasdaq Launches Internet Index

The Nasdaq (Nasdaq:NDAQ) today announced it has launched the NASDAQ Internet Index (Nasdaq:QNET). The Index is a new benchmark designed to track the performance of companies engaged in a broad range of internet-related services such as:

1) internet access providers
2) internet search engines
3) web hosting
4) website design
5) internet retail commerce

"The NASDAQ Internet Index is comprised of securities of companies that are at the forefront of internet technology. They are leading innovators in providing faster internet access, creating more intuitive e-commerce experiences, and developing the second generation Web," said NASDAQ Senior Vice President Steven Bloom.

However, they NASDAQ did not provide a break down of the index composition. Many in internet industry have relied on Google (Nasdaq:GOOG) to be a proxy of the internet industry. Why not! Google operates:

1) the largest search engine
2) the largest online advertising network
3) the largest online video site
4) the third largest social networking site
5) one of the largest payment flow services, email and mapping services

Soon Google will be a big player in:
6) mobile applications
7) productivity applications
8) online storage services (other than email)

Demystifying The Social Graph

For the uninitiated, I will first explain what the social graph is and why it is so talked about today. Almost all of us are on some social network today. In that network, we are linked with people we know either because we were class mates or are colleagues or neighbors, etc. Now, try to imagine every person as a node in a graph and if two people are connected on a network, it means an edge or line is drawn between those two nodes in a social graph. One instance of it would be the following picture which illustrates a sample social graph.

As one can very well imagine, the whole world can be said to be a huge social graph. This graph has, for instance, an interesting property called six degrees of separation.

Now when a person has an account in a particular social network like Myspace or Facebook, they have an almost similar social graph in both of these sites. There are then many new social networks or services with social network features springing up all of which require or are based on our social graph. So presently, a user has to create a new profile and re-make all those connections that they already have in other networks to be a part of new network. For instance, if a person wants to join Friendfeed, they need to create new connections that they already have in MySpace. A solution for such a problem has been offered by saying that a user should be able to carry his social graph with him. That is, if each user has an open social graph that any service can access, then all the services that need social networking features would be very easy to implement. Thus, social graphs should be open and owned by the user rather than the social networking site as it is today where user data is not accessible by other services.

It is also understandable that Facebook or MySpace would not want to open up this information, as the social graph is the main reason that people come to these sites. Facebook is a platform which allows many applications to be developed using its social graph. Now if Facebook opens up, all these applications that need such information won't need to be on Facebook. Presently, a Friendfeed-like application in Facebook has more chances of success rather than Friendfeed's site, simply because Facebook owns the social network while Friendfeed doesn't. But if Facebook opens up, it loses this advantage.

There are presently attempts being made to solve this problem. Some of these are:

1) An open non-profit software for handling identity and the social graph that will manage user identity using OpenId. eg. manage the social graph on behalf of users therefore, enabling social applications to bloom.
2) Maybe, its OpenSocial which aims to create common standard APIs on which to build social applications. Note that it solves the above problem in a different way. While there may be many different social networks where users have social graphs, it creates a common, public API for accessing them and hence eases development of social applications. However, after its initial hype and release, response has been a bit underwhelming as I noted in this article.
3) Another attempt is Plaxo Pulse. In their words, it is an online address book which syncs with many other address books like Gmail and Yahoo that I own. You can also read a possible implementation of building an Open Social Graph.

An Open Social Graph that is owned by the user and not any company is needed as it will solve the many problems presently faced by users. Once it comes up, we can expect the bolstering of countless services that depend on the social graph of a user.

Image source: GNESPY.

Social Networks Hit Mainstream

Pepperidge Farm is moving the old-fashioned tea party for soccer moms to the online realm. The company has launched a social networking community artofthecookie to help women improve their social lives.

Other companies getting in on the action with their own social networking community sites are Jockey (jockeyunderwars.com), Dove (campaignforrealbeauty.com), Proctor & Gamble (beautifullengths.com), and Goldfish (fishfulthinking.com) aimed at building community and their respective brands amongst their target audiences.

Member Overlap Between Social Networks

Why Social Networks Make For Good Business

Charlene Li, VP and Principal Analyst, at Forrester Research has written on why companies should consider adopting social networks as part of their sales & marketing arsenal.

Let’s start with a fundamental premise – that all business is social and personal. Business involves people and communications and we all prize “networking” skills and opportunities. Businesses don’t strike deals with each other – people do. And we build bonds by talking about everything from sports teams and the weather to our families and hobbies.

So we as business people already engage in social networking every day, primarily through phone calls, emails, meetings, and events. The same activities take place on social networking sites – people share the tidbits and moments that build relationships.

What’s the business value of staying on top of your network? As we know from experience, priceless.

Admittedly, social networking is still in its nascent stages and there aren't currently too many good business applications available. Hence, the reason we don't see too much of it in the corporate arena. However, there are some examples of social networking being used in corporate HR for recruiting candidates by the likes of Ernst & Young no less, and for community building by Bank of America, and eBay. Academia also uses social networks for recruiting students. So, although social networking may not be appropriate for every company, if your company's target market is already on social networks, there may be some value in exploring that option.

Top Trends in Corporate 2.0 Sites

I've been scouring around quite a bit online to identify some of the top trends in corporate websites. These sites have traditionally been nothing more than brochure-ware displaying static content like mission statements, and product and contact info. In reality, not a whole lot has changed. While the Web has evolved at internet speed from the early days of Web 1.0 to 2.0, corporate sites have remained relatively the same and many are in danger of becoming relics of the past. We were going to have an event on "The New Corporate Website" which we decided to slate for another time in light of the OpenSocial phenom that came about.

So, what's the deal. Today's corporate website is still a sales and communication channel but not of the same manifestation as yesteryear's; the DNA of these sites have changed. There are a lot of Social Media and Web 2.0 components making their way to the corporate arena. Today's new corporate website is less static, stagnant, and one-dimensional.

Here are some of the trends I found:

• Widgetization of the web
  No suprise here. The corporate marketing-ites have jumped on this bandwagon and proven the Newsweek declaration that this is the "Year of the Widget" to be true. Although, I think this year was more about the hype and next year we will see more commercialization of widgets as more and more companies get caught up and the others push the marketing efforts on their initial adoption.


• Social networking cum customer networking
  It is built for customers, with customers. Live chatting has been around for a while for customer support but full-blown social networking sites have been created to serve customers better and to build and grow the network and community and utlimately, customer loyalty and goodwill. A good example is eBay's Neighborhoods.


• Blogs
  Blogs are being harnessed carefully and selectively. Not a lot of corporate blogs except for notable ones like Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog which provides insight into the company and its products. The rarity of these blogs is mostly for fear of legal and market backlash, but a lot of companies have externally facing blogs by employees. The problem is that unless its the CEO or some high-profile employee or a sexy company, or if the blogs are not fully endorsed by the company and marketed and supported, they will flail.


• Rich Media Content
  Live or on-demand rich streaming media content with a real person demo'ing or talking about a new product or service offering. This is much preferred and more effective than just straight textual content. But keep it real. Too many companies still can't let go of the canned, highly produced videos. Customers don't want to see that either but the context is important. Use by product managers and for customer testimonials are great but how-to's are more valuable to customers. Some companies even have video on their homepage. Audio-only podcasts are also common but offer a different dimension to video.


• RSS
  RSS feeds that people can subscribe to to get the latest information delivered to them as it is available versus going to a site to find it. This is very uselful for alerts, breaking news, etc. for customers, partners, and financial community.

I didn't see the use of a lot of other Web 2.0-esque elements like wikis (probably better suited for extranets and intranets) and mashups on corporate sites. The web is a powerful tool and many companies are realizing that if they don't utilize their websites effectively, they won't be able to effectively go the distance. Clearly, there is still a ways to go.

Yahoo Launching Social Networking Site

Yahoo is said to be working on a social networking community site called Kickstart which is a professional network to connect college students, recent grads, professionals and alumni to discover internships and jobs, or get career advice and mentorship. The site states that KickStart is in its preview release with no mention of a general availability date. The service allows you to create a profile, browse company profiles, network with your peers, professors, alumni and potential employers, source new hires, give back to your college, and re-connect with fellow alumni and past colleagues. And the kicker is "Yahoo! will donate $25,000 to the alumni association of the college with the most profiles".

Yahoo has previously made unsuccessful attempts to gain a foothold in the lucrative social networking space with services such as Yahoo 360 blog turned social network, Y! Pipes, its rumored social networking site called Yahoo Mosh, and most recently its failed bid for Facebook.

Yahoo is also planning to release another new service this month, code-named FireEagle, a geo-location service which will let users tell their friends or other websites and services their location and which can me mashed up with other web services.

The Web Is Better When It's Social

Maka maka. It's official! Google's platform agnostic API OpenSocial is live. Per its Product Managers:

"OpenSocial is a set of common APIs that will work on many different social websites, including MySpace, Hi5, Ning, orkut, and LinkedIn, among others. In addition, this allows developers to learn one API, then write a social application for any of those sites. Learn once, write anywhere, if you will. And because it's built on web standards like HTML and JavaScript, developers don't have to learn a custom programming language." (like Facebook's proprietary ftml maybe?!)

"Perhaps most interestingly, we will see social capabilities move into new contexts. OpenSocial will also work in non-traditional social contexts, such as on Salesforce.com and Oracle. With a common set of APIs, it will be even easier to extend social functionality. Beyond the many fun and entertaining social applications we already have seen, we think we'll see a number of social applications emerge in business contexts."

The business applications and adaptations of this should very interesting.

Wal-Mart's Social Media Marketing Transgressions

When it comes to Social Media Marketing there are few failure examples to learn from. Mainly because it's so new but also because many failures get quietly swept under the rug. Unfortunately for Wal-Mart, their mistakes are in the limelight but that gives us the opportunity to learn from them. Here are some pitfalls they could have avoided:

False Transparency - They got caught red-handed for staging thier blog (Wal-Marting Across America) leaving their readers feeling cheated and lied to. The couple who was RVing across the US turned out to be a PR stunt.

Build it and They Will Come Mentality - Last summer Wal-Mart built their own social networking site for teens. Did they really think they could compete head-to-head with MySpace? With more than 3% of their traffic coming from MySpace at that time, why not optimize that relationship and go where the community already exists? Doh! After just 10-weeks the site was taken down...

Obsessed with Control

• Their recent Facebook campaign is anything but open and genuine. If you're going to leverage a social media platform like Facebook you have to be willing to open the kimono. Instead they decided to keep a lock down on comments and disabled the forum feature leaving visitors irritated and upset.
  
• They are now threatening their customers from posting Black Friday ad posts. Why would they go to such extremes - they should be rewarding people who want to talk about them - especially since it's not threatening to their business. Reward your customers for having a voice - don't reprimand them.

This realm of Marketing 2.0 is new for all of us and there will certainly be a trial-and-error period but I think these mistakes could have been avoided with a little research and education. I gotta give Wal-Mart credit for not giving up and at least one attempt has worked - reviews and ratings - let's just hope they can handle the negative reviews. It’s clear though that at this point, they’re not getting it. Marketing 2.0 is about enabling conversations and they don’t seem to be interested in that. Quite the opposite in fact. They’re still acting like it’s a different kind of radio.

Google's OpenSocial To Go Live Today

Google's highly anticipated OpenSocial app platform where developers can create applications that work on its own social networking sites like Orkut and any participating social networks is set to go live today. News of this was first reported by TechCrunch in September.

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for building social applications on the web. These common APIs mean that developers only have to learn once in order to start building social applications for multiple websites, and any website will be able to implement OpenSocial and host social applications.

These APIs will allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

- Profile Information (user data)
- Friends Information (social graph)
- Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Developers such as Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide will create apps which can be hosted on participating social networks such as Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo, Oracle, MySpace, Bebo, and SixApart.

OpenSocial is in direct response to Facebook which allows developers to create apps on the Facebook platform but which are not portable to other platforms. With OpenSocial, apps will work not only on Google but across other platforms.

Next Gen Social Networks

The video of the October event on the Next Generation of Social Networking featuring Socialzr, RockYou, and Appfuels is now available. If you missed the event or simply want a re-cap, check it out to hear what the panelists had to say on this hot topic.

Next Generation Social Networking

Last Wednesday, the WebGuild held its monthly event on the "Next Generation of Social Networking" featuring Jonathan Abrams, Founder & CEO of Socializr & Freindster fame, Jia Shen, CTO of Rock You, and Sundeep Ahuja, Founder of Appfuels. It was a highly social event - well attended and high energy.

If you missed it, the video of this event will be available in about a week. View photos.

Social Networks Going Corporate

For companies with the foresight, Web 2.0 is enabling the transformation of corporate web sites from stodgy old static brochure-ware sites to more dynamic and multi-dimensional sites. Corporate 2.0 sites are integrating social networks, social networking components, or creating separate social networking companion sites.

Old world companies like Cisco are trying to make a foray into this brave new world of social networking via their purchases of Tribe and Five Across. eBay has created its own social networking site called "Neighborhoods" to build a sense of community with users. Even Bank Of America jumped into the game with a social network for small business owners.

This can be a scary new world for old world companies relinquishing control of their carefully crafted images and opening themselves up to criticism from customers actually providing live feedback for the world to see. However, leveraging the social networking platform is a huge opportunity and if done well can yield trememdous benefits such as:
-realtime feedback from your customers. You definitely know what people think and feel, what works and what doesn't and can use it as an opportunity to improve your products and/or services and to correct any public relations issues.
-opportunity to build brand loyalty as customers will see that you value them, and to respond to their issues or concerns.
-opportunity to enable commerce. If customers are recommending your products/services then that can only serve to drive up sales.
-more content and more fluid, timely, user-generated content. Less expensive content for you to create.

Second Life's Allure Withering

A study conducted by the Yankee Group is indicating that Second Life, a site which provides an online society within a 3D world, where users can explore, build, socialize and participate in their own economy, is whithering. The study aptly titled "Whither Second Life?" contends that "the hype surrounding Second Life doesn't match its actual marketplace impact." The site was started back in 2003 and has received much acclaim. There is even a course at Harvard focused on the Second Life model.

The Yankee Group notes,"Despite near continuous coverage in the popular and business press, metaverses like Second Life are experiencing slowing growth and limited impact because of the tethered nature of their virtual world experience." The study reveals that Second Life's growth rate has slowed and user engagement have levelled off to 12 minutes per month. In the meantime, social networking behemoths MySpace and Facebook are experiencing "steady increases in both the number of users and the intensity of user engagement". Facebook's average time spent per user increased 24 percent over six months to 186 minutes per month.

"All is not lost with virtual worlds," Yankee Group senior analyst Christopher Collins said in a statement. "However, for virtual worlds and metaverses to achieve greater potential in the marketplace and grow beyond early adopters, the experience must be untethered to meet the needs of the Anywhere Consumer. Companies that provide remote access - through mobile devices or other means - to their Web experience will have a greater impact than PC-centric companies."

The withering heights of Second Life is an indication of perhaps a need for a next generation of social networking communities. The WebGuild's next Event on October 17 is focused on precisely this issue and will examine what that "Next Generation of Social Networking" will be like. Check it out!