Posts tagged ‘MySpace’
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…Oh My
I recently wrote an article in Eagle Magazine on social media and the 3 major networks. This covers the basics of social media and the reason behind the phenomenon. I have reprinted the article below. Enjoy:
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn… Oh My: Social networking isn’t limited to coffee shops and cocktail parties anymore
There is an analogy I often use in my seminars to describe how social media has not only shaped the evolution of the Internet, it has changed how we interact as a society. When you go to any coffee shop in town, you will find small tribes of people gathered around tables and comfortable couches, favorite beverage in hand, simply chatting about everything from relationships to what was on TV last night. These bands of socialites have simply moved their discussion from a face to face interaction to what can only be described as the “Virtual Coffee Shop”.
The web has become simply one giant coffee shop, with groups huddled around computer monitors discussing everything from green living to cancer to cars. As these conversation technologies evolve and new tools emerge, the need to discuss important topics in our lives any time of the day or night becomes even more compelling. Social media technologies are just an extension of our daily interactions with those in our lives.
Take Twitter for instance. Three years ago this 10 million strong (and growing) social network was merely a gleam in some programmer’s eye. Today it is the fastest growing social network on the planet. According to Mashable.com, the social web’s source for news, Twitter grew 1382% in year-over-year growth as of February 20091. The media is replete with mentions of Twitter. Jimmy Fallon uses Twitter to solicit questions for guests on his new late night talk show. Shaquille O’neal uses Twitter to interact with fans and give away tickets to games. Major brands are searching the “Twitterverse” to monitor conversations about their brands in order to contribute to the discussion.
What is Twitter you ask? It was built on the notion that anyone could describe what he or she was doing at any moment in 140 characters or less. In practice, it has become a valuable tool for building deeper relationships through much more frequent contact and for aggregating content from many other sources on the web. Twitter can turn you into a mini “rock star” by creating your very own media channel to which anyone can subscribe.
Another network experiencing exponential growth right now is Facebook. A mere 5 years old, Facebook currently has 200 million users and is growing at a pace of approximately 1 million users per week. To put it into perspective, if Facebook were a country, it would be the 6th largest in the word based on population. When my 59 year old mother communicates with me regularly on Facebook, you know it has leapt from the land of geeks and bleeding-heart teens to mainstream.
While Twitter is like being in a busy coffee shop trying to hear your friend over many different conversations going on at once, Facebook takes a more segmented approach to online conversation. First of all, your home page is a news feed that shows only the changes that have been made to the profiles of those in your network. Second of all, you can join groups, become a fan of your favorite business or artist, and even play interactive games with those in your network. It can be both a time waster as well as a valuable business tool. In fact, most people will tell you it has even become one giant high school reunion for them.
Twitter and Facebook serve as that unique intersection between your social and professional lives. They can be valuable business tools or simply a way to stay in touch with family and friends. LinkedIn, however, is all business. In its simplest form, LinkedIn is an interactive resume and Rolodex. In practice, however, it is the online version of the business cocktail party, without the constraints of time or space. You can make introductions, provide a recommendation for those you have worked with in the past, and even ask for help from your network on a pressing question you may have. If you are a professional, own a business, or work in an field you would consider a “career” you should be on LinkedIn.
While the networks may come and go (MySpace is on the decline, for instance) one thing is true. Social media has brought the world together. No longer are we limited by time or space, but we can stay in constant contact with those that matter most to us. If you haven’t yet made the plunge, there is no better time to jump on the social media bandwagon. There is plenty of company.
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Top 25 Social Networks
Recently, Compete.com posted new statistics on the Top 25 Social Networks ranked by monthly visits. While many social networks like to tout their number of users, monthly visits is a true measurement of usage. In other words, which social networks are getting used? The numbers are below:
(Credit Compete.com)
As you can see from the numbers, Facebook has taken over the top spot from MySpace and previously little known Twitter has climbed to the third spot after the two behemoths. In fact, if you read the original blog post on Compete.com, you will see a few other graphs that show MySpace’s numbers falling while Facebook and Twitter continue meteoric rises.
What’s even more fascinating is that, according to the CNET News blog, these numbers only represent web browser traffic in the U.S. According to writer Caroline McCarthy, “That means that you won’t be pulling in any international numbers, where most of Facebook’s users are now, or data from widgets or third-party applications, which are how many avid Twitter users access the service. That means that it’s likely that Twitter’s reach is bigger than the numbers indicate.”
How does this apply to you? I have often told people in conversation that I am an early adpoter when it comes to social media, which means I am not the innovator who jumps on every new technology in its infant stages but wait for a certain mass before it has business value. I follow many innovators (such as my friend Tac Anderson or Joseph Jaffe) in order to keep my finger on the pulse of what is the latest and greatest, but look for networks or technologies that can really add value for clients. If you want to know whether a social networks would add value to your business, the 25 networks above are a safe bet.
That being said, I have always held true to the notion that focus is better than mass. If there is a small social community out there that is extremely targeted to your core audience, then you need to be an active participant. Sometimes, these social communities are housed within existing networks, such as the 25 above, and sometimes they are separate. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, the web is a collection of coffee shops with people around a table chatting. You need to find the coffee shop that best fits your audience and get involved.
As an old economics professor of mine used to say, “there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics”. While one thing that blogs are great for is spewing the latest statistics to prove a point, one thing is true. With numbers even close to these, businesses can no longer argue with the value of social media in facilitating and participating in conversations.
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All Media is Social Media
I have been involved in social media for about the last 5 years, although it has gone by many names: grassroots, word of mouth, new media, Web 2.0, viral, social networking, etc. It seems like we have finally arrived at a term that everyone is comfortable with: social media. It appears that the reason why most are satisfied with social media to describe the blog/podcast/MySpace/Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn phenomenon is that what all these technologies have in common is that they are all about conversations. They encourage people to engage with each other.
I think that is a great way to describe the explosion of conversation technologies. However, I would argue that based on this definition, all media is social. All media encourages conversation, good or bad. However, social media simply captures that conversation in a nicely oraganized format online.
There are many who think of social media as a tactic only and fail to realize that it is, in fact, a cultural phenomenon. Much the same way that you feel frustration when you can’t fast forward through a commercial on a DVR because we have become accustomed to controlling our content, we feel frustrated when a brand does not have the proper tools for discussion online when we need to react to what they are doing. The conversation will take place, online or off. Wouldn’t you rather have take place in a way that you can faciliatate and participate in that conversation? This is what made shows like American Idol so popular is the ability for the audience to engage with the brand.
So while I praise the industry for arriving at a standard term for all of the online mumbo jumbo, let us remember that all media, when used correctly, should be social. So why not use social media to capture the conversation?
The Missing Ingredient: Automation
For about the last 5 years, I have been involved in the word of mouth marketing and social media space. I have seen new technologies grow overnight and become relevant components of the online marketing mix. Names like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn were mostly non-existent 5 years ago. Using the term “blog” in every day conversation would elicit strange looks. The landscape has completely changed in that short amount of time.
Previous to my consultant days, I marketed and sold enterprise software. I have sold everything from enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) programs to accounting and retail systems. These software systems were all about automation. You automate the menial tasks and the critical path processes as much as possible.
As social media shifts from techies to early adopters and the early majority, people begin to ask, “where is the business value?” Honestly, that has been the argument for the last 5 years. Now that it has finally taken hold, people are beginning to see how social media can build relationships and grow businesses.
That being said, there are a lot of people who have the same problem with social media that they do with CRM systems, you actually have to go there and open them up and check them/input information. It takes time and effort to do the little things.
I have seen a new trend in social media where the combination of the automation principles from enterprise software with the ambient awareness of social media are creating integration, making social media simpler and more pervasive.
I first heard the term “ambient awareness” in a New York Times article discussing the rise of Facebook and Twitter. The concept of ambient awareness is the ability to passively monitor what is going on in all your networks until something sparks your interest and you comment on it. Facebook took off once it added the News Feed. Twitter grew solely based on ambient awareness. The beauty of ambient awareness is that through RSS, you can integrate your networks in order to consolidate your monitoring. Twitter can even act as a consolidation tool.
Let me give you a few examples:
I can connect my Twitter account to Facebook so that Twitter updates Facebook’s status field. Everytime I update my status in Facebook, it shows up on the News feed of my entire network. You can also comment on someone’s status in Facebook. Therefore, I have held conversations on both Twitter and Facebook from a single Tweet. That’s automation and integration.
Also, you can connect RSS feeds into Twitter. This means you can have a new blog post, a social tag, or any other form of social media post automatically to Twitter. I have found Twitter to be a very effective tool for blog promotion. Everytime I post a new blog post, I see a spike in traffic from Twitter. It is also great for furthering a cause using social tagging.
However, I have found a tool now that will allow me to use e-mail (which has a much higer adoption rate than any of these other tools) as an ambient awareness vehicle. I have mentioned InfusionSoft in previous posts, but I wanted to talk about why I became a Certified Marketing Automation Coach for InfusionSoft.
I am a technology junkie and I have been looking for technology that could help me deliver what I preached. I stumbled across InfusionSoft (actually they found me) and was impressed with its automation capabilities. Combined with social media, I had finally found a combination that could drive sales and give me the ability to track almost every aspect of my customer interaction. Best of all, it was automated and didn’t require people to have to go in and input all the information.
I can produce some great content (white paper, blog post, eBook) and create a web form from InfusionSoft that will allow someone to enter their information in order to download it. That information is automatically entered into my system and a follow-up sequence set in motion to keep my subscriber posted on what I am doing. Each month, I aggregate all of my social media content into an eNewsletter and push it out to subscribers with links to the social web. Now I can use the great content I produce with social media to build relationships and move people down the sales pipeline.
Whatever the tools, integration and automation are where social media is headed. Even Google’s OpenSocial initiative is all about integration. With the number of social media sites and tools out there, you have to be able to integrate in order to lower the switching costs and maintain your sanity.
How are you using technology to integrate and automate?
What is Web 3.0?
I have heard this term rolling around for a little bit. At first, I thought it was another guy trying to make a name for himself by coining a phrase (and not a very creative one at that) and then trying to get it to stick. I mean, people are just starting to figure out how to use Web 2.0, but then you heap 3.0 on top of us and we are drowning in a sea of 1s and 0s (OK, let’s not be dramatic here).
The reality is that, although Web 3.0 is still being formulated, one thing is for sure – Web 3.0 will take advantage of artificial intelligence to create a more productive and intuitive user experience. You can read the Wikipedia definition here. Basically, this simply means that Web 3.0 will better understand what you want and need and will automatically serve it up to you. Pretty cool, huh?
There is still a lot of theory behind Web 3.0 and a lot of buzz words being thrown around like semantic web, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence, however, we have recently seen actual applications in this space that cause one to think that Web 3.0 may not be far away.
One such company is Certona Corporation. While the company has bee around for a few years, it is finally establishing a customer base with solid results to showcase. The company produces software that turns your eCommerce website into an artificial intelligence engine that will serve up content, product recommendations, or even coupons based on your browsing behavior. Picture a retail sales rep that knows exactly what you will want next and gives you a recommendation for it or even a coupon. Bet you would go back to that store again.
One of their more prominent case studies is with Personal Creations which, according to a press release, it the “top provider of personalized gifts in the United States.” Personal Creations is attributing 20% of its sales revenue to the system created by Certona. That is pretty impressive.
Not to sound like a Certona ad here, there are several other companies popping up now that are taking advantage of Web 3.0 technologies to create highly customized user experiences, beyond anything we have seen before. While Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube have taken ownership of Web 2.0, we have yet to see who will emerge as the reigning champions of Web 3.0. Will it be you?
(**Author’s note – this post was NOT sponsored by Certona. I just thought it was cool)
