Tag Archives: social networks

social medial tools

Posted by on June 12, 2009 No comments

Great overview from Maisha Walker at Inc. http://blog.inc.com/e-commerce/2009/06/a_guide_to_social_media_tools.html

getting started with social media

Posted by on February 20, 2009 No comments

I caught a tweet over at Robert Scoble’s Twitter site the other day that referenced a CEO who was asking how to drive business via social media.  I had been thinking about this as well – in particular about how a small business or non-profit gets started with such an effort.  Here are my thoughts at a high level. ..

Fundamentally, social media provides new ways to connect, communicate, and collaborate with others.  They enhance our ability to build and nurture relationships and to share ideas in more robust and innovative ways.   That said, they help you foster conversations – they don’t guarantee you get any business :) . 

There are more than enough books on the subject, but here is short list of ideas to get started…

  1. Enable a Conversation.  Start a blog about your business and use it as a way to enable a conversation with your customers, partners, and/or professionals within your community of practice.  Through the blog, consider audio casts or podcasts to enhance the visitor’s experience and to tell your story in more interesting ways…
  2. Develop An Audience-Centric Voice. Offer value-add information to your audience to build rapport, credibility, and trust. Become the conduit between the world of your business or industry and the people who can benefit from it.  This can be as the business or as one or several individuals.
  3. Build a Personal Brand. Building on an audience-centric strategy, be your own champion. Share with your audience the passion you have for your business and industry and your passion to help your audience be successful. Find and nurture other champions for your business and bring them into your network and/or conversations.
  4. Participate. Find communities of practice and engage with other professionals. Collaborate and share best practices. You learn, they learn. Bring your knowledge back to your own audience.  Leverage bookmarking tools and aggregators to stay abreast of industry information. Synthesize. Share. Comment.
  5. Go Where People Already Are.  This was offered as T-Mobile’s wi-fi strategy when they rolled out services across the world’s Starbucks locations.  Social network sites are great for creating micro-communities of friends and/or business associates. Many of these sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), allow users to create groups, pull in feeds from content aggregators, and – generally – share a significant amount of information with other users. 
  6. Think Systemically. Cross-link with others’ blogs, business sites, and online resources (i.e. partners, customers, other experts, and industry associations).  The more links you have, the more likely you will be found by others.  Links also connect you into other networks providing opportunity to grow your community or reach new ones. 
  7. Measure Progress.  Links, site visits, downloads, and RSS feeds can all be measured (and any other interaction over the web).   Track them over time to see how you’re doing.

Through a combination of some of these, or similar, efforts you can build greater visibility for your business through community building and engaging conversations. My personal recommendation is to start simple, hone your online voice and persona, and learn your way around, then scale. 

In my next post, I’ll outline a couple of scenarios using popular sites, services, and tools to illustrate these concepts in a practical way.

Blyk. A new social experiment in mobility.

Posted by on November 16, 2007 No comments

This reminds me a bit of the old netzero play. Free internet as long as you were willing to take on a few pop-up ads from sponsors. Hopefully they’ve worked out the kinks. Blyk in their own words  “is the new mobile network for 16 - 24s” thats funded by advertising. Blyk links young people with brands they like and gives them free texts and minutes every month.” Not a bad value proposition for young people who have limited resources (but otherwise what seems like an endless supply of disposable income, right parents?). Free minutes and free texting for opting-in to a social network with sponsors. The Blyk team goes on to explain that they “have developed [their] offer by finding out what [their] members consider most valuable – this will evolve over time as their needs do. ” In other words, Blyk controls the channel and the sponsorship will evolve based on market trends and consumer demand.  The constant becomes the social forum in which consumers and sponsors meet. Not unlike a shopping mall perhaps?

This should be very interesting to watch. Blyk expects to launch a pan-european program in 2008 targeting an estimated 40MM subscribers (they launched UK today). So, there are certainly a number of mobile operators in Europe who will be keeping an eye on this (and I need to find out whose network they’re riding on). I  actually posted this morning on challenges that mobile operators face today with ‘walled garden’ services. Perhaps this model is a game changer for communication service providers across the board? Time will tell.

Consumers in this age range are very particular. The novelty might grab their attention, but the service will need to be exceptional and the sponsors will need to be cautious. If users think they are talking through an ‘ad phone’ of sorts, I think it will crash and burn – even if it is free.  Avoiding hassle is one reason why we pay a premium for things sometimes, right? Blyk is headed by Pekka Ala-Pietil, former president of Nokia and 28 other industry veterans.  I’m guessing that they’ve thought through these issues but I’ve been surprised before. UK launched today, so we’ll start seeing take rates, and more importantly retention rates, in the next few weeks and months.

social networks

Posted by on November 5, 2007 No comments

Per my last post, I pulled down a panel discussion from the Stanford Technology Ventures program. Its worth a listen if you follow this space although you won’t get into much granularity. One comment that stood out was a forecast that social network sites will be obsolete in ten years. The thinking is that technology will evolve to such a degree that the notion of specific sites to manage our personas, profiles, and friend lists will seem archaic to users at that time. Instead, the nature of pervasive , or ubiquitous, computing will allow us to make the connections with others more seamlessly and with less effort.  An example given is that we might wear technology that carries our profile and when we come in contact with someone of similar interests, the technologies make the appropriate connection for us – perhaps noting the other user’s profile to be reviewed at a later time (Location based services are evolving rapidly for mobile technology so the idea is not that far fetched). But I digress. In the end – a good talking points to think about. For now, there is a significant amount of research on the topic as social networks exist today.  One resource that recently came to my attention is the work being done by Dana Boyd (Berkeley) and Nicole Ellison at Michigan State. See Dana’s post here or link directly to their research here. From the site, they cover a usable definition of “social network sites”, a history of some of the major shifts in the development of SNSs, a literature review of work done in this space, and a description of the articles included in the special issue. This is a great read and a great starting point for those interested in this topic.