The options for adding community features to your web site seem to multiply every day.  You know you need to add social features to your web site, but how? 

1 - Assessment - What are your goals?  What are the opportunities to enhance your web site’s value with social features and create a community for your clients, users, and/or site visitors?  Review of your goals and the opportunities, then prioritize them so you know which features have the most potential value.  Also determine your desired timing and budget range.

2 - Technology Approach - There are 3 main ways you can enhance your site. One is to pay a developer to do custom work.  Another is to cobble together various single-purpose functions.  The third is to select an integrated platform.  Today, there are many comprehensive platforms wihich range from low cost, all the way up to high-end systems.  Given the variety of integrated solutions, price points, and the benefits they provide, it usually makes the most sense to select a platform. 

3 - Platform Selection - With almost 100 options available today, selecting a platform can be an intimidating task.  Find a partner who is familiar with the range of options and who can help you select the platform that best matches your needs and your budget.  We maintain an index of over 80 different platform options as well as separate lists of specific single-purpose technical solutions.

4 - Planning - Next plan out your desired site changes and enhancements by grouping them into phases.  It’s important to group the changes into manageable sets which you can implement incrementally.  This helps you deliver enhancements in a reasonable time period and helps prove the technology and allow the site development team to gain experience at a reasonable pace.  If you try to do too much all at once, it can be overwhelming and often results in missed schedules and cost overruns.  A good rule of thumb is to keep each phase to about 8 weeks in length.  This is long enough to make solid progress, but not so big that the team can get too far off track.

5 - Design - All web site work should, at least, go through a review or redesign that includes visual design, navigational structure, and user interface (UI) design.

6 - Implementation - The technical team takes the plan, the designs, the selected platform, and implements the new functionality.

7 - Training - Be sure to plan for who will update the new features of your web site, write blog entries, moderate group postings, and such.  Training the team is essential to a successful relaunch.

8 - Testing - Plan to test all of your site’s new features and your site launch/release process.

9 - Site Relaunch - If you have prepared properly, everything surrounding your site launch or relaunch should go smoothly.

10 - Site/Community Promotion - It’s time to announce your new site and its new features.  Be sure to set reasonable expectations.  All of the big online success stories took time to build up steam.

If you plan ahead, use a good process, and work with a knowledgable team, your web project has the best chance to be successful and get delivered on time and on budget.

Facebook’s new look is all about Twitter-envy.  So what does this mean to marketers?  Read on.

Fast Company’s Kyle Austin jumps right on the new twitter-like features launched by Facebook yesterday and how marketers can best leverage them.

#1 - Post Updates Frequently

#2 - Take Advantage of Facebook Advertising

#3 - Watch Coca-Cola

#4 - Use Video

#5 - Get Your Employees Involved in WOM (Word of Mouth) Marketing on the Page

Read more here about each tip here: Fast Company: 5 Tips for Marketing on Facebook’s New Pages

Personally, I believe the new ‘TwitBook’ feature is a very powerful weapon.  Just be very careful you don’t shoot yourself or your brand in the foot with this great new tool.

Twitter has proven itself very valuable and Facebook has validated that value by imitating Twitter in their new user interface.  The complaining has already started amongst the Facebook faithful, and I’m sure FB saw that coming, but they made a conscious choice.  The pain is worth the gain.  Twitter is too hot to let it gain a runaway lead.  The Facebook execs are making a huge bet here and Twitter benefits either way.

If you are drooling at the prospects of using these features to market to the 150 million Facebook users, remember modertation is key. So are the other hallmarks of social media like authenticty and transparency.  Marketing with social media is not about running around yelling “Buy Me!“.  It’s not about traditional advertising either.  Social media Marketing is about the essence of a good brand, trust. 

Back in the early web days we had a client who wanted to acquire an email list and spam the world.  I tried to explain why that wasn’t a good idea.  The same concepts apply here. 

Be friendly.  Be helpful.  Be honest.  Then they will trust your brand and they will not just buy when they have a need, they will tell their friends how great you are.  That’s the new social side of marketing.

Has Twitter hit the tipping point?  That depends on how you define the tipping point.  In any case there’s no question that Twitter is entering the mainstream consciousness.  The key question is where will Twitter go from here?

Twitter is riding the now famous hype curve, but will it flame out or will it persist?  We knew Google had really arrived when people started using it as a verb.  Facebook hit the major growth phase last year and now Facebooking is an accepted verb. 

Estimates of Twitter visitor traffic grew by 10 to 15 x in 2008.  Now everywhere i look there is a new article being written about Twitter.  And Twittering or it’s alternate verb form of ‘Tweeting’ is becoming commonplace.

But what does the future hold?  It’s hard to say, Twitter is making a lot of good moves, but the Twitter is still not a well-defined or well-understood phenomenon even for its founders.  They are just following their instincts.  Every day new uses and unexpected benefits from using Twitter are being discovered. 

I’m very optimistic though.  Let me explain why. 

1) A Solid Open API - Twitter has a solid API that enables lots of interesting and creative ideas to be created.  This has already generated over 100 Twitter-based services and applications.  Enabling creativitiy is crucial and it’s why new applications for Twitter keep surfacing.

2) Eco Conscious - No, not that eco.  I’m talking about being eco-system friendly.  This is something traditional business people don’t understand. This is a deep subject so I’ll write a separate post on the value of eco-systems and how sharing the pie creates a much bigger and better pie.  Most dominant companies in the past got that way by controlling their whole market to an extreme.  Think monopolies.  Today we know better.  Fostering an eco-system helps everyone.  Twitter seems to get this fundamental fact of innovative growth.

3) Creative Openness - The team at Twitter has shown strong instincts which are needed to maximize the potential of something so revolutionary.  There is no roadmap for this uncharted territory.  What you need is flexibility and good instincts.  So far Twitter has evolved far beyond what the founders thought it was in the beginning.  This creative openness will be essential to navigating the uncharted frontier which lies ahead.

4) Value - The old saying that ‘success breeds success’ is very true.  The success of Twitter so far, it’s rapid growth and adoption by individuals and businesses, is evidence of real value.  That value is likely to continue to expand as the creativity of hundreds or thousands of innovative organizations work to build on the foundation that Twitter has built.

Only time will tell for sure, but this snowball has all the signs of a truly revolutionary new medium.

For the hard-core ROI side of the story here is a great article from August 2008 that makes the case that there is no way Twitter can succeeed.  They make good points, but There are plenty of ‘exceptions that prove the rule’ in all fields.  YouTube got acquired before it ever made a dime.  I figured it for dead.  But Google wanted to be in the video market and Google Video was a failure compared to YouTube.

Fast Company interviews Twitter Co-founder Ev Williams about how this hot new business started and evolved.

Ev Williams’ first hit business, Blogger, was a side project.  Blogger quickly grew into the most popular blogging platform and was acquired by Google.  Four years ago Ev was involved with a company called Odeo and that generated another now-famous, fast-growing side project, Twitter.

This interview reveals a bit more about the phenomenon called Twitter.

This excerpt from the interview explains why Evan is excited.

Q: What do you think the future will hold for Twitter?

A: We really believe Twitter is potentially massive in terms of its impact on millions and millions of people. I believe it’s bigger than anything I’ve ever worked on. We have high hopes for it. We’re not looking to sell it anytime soon. We’re just looking to execute right now and get it to as many people as possible. I don’t know what that number is, but I think it’s as big as the biggest Internet successes out there today. The more I work on it, the more I see opportunity.

If you are on Twitter you can get Evan’s tweets by following @EV.

The Curious Genius of Twitter - Fast Company.com

Rumors are that Google made an attempt, Facebook admits a recent attempt, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos already invested last June (2008).  The most recent investment is reportedly

TechCrunch reported on 1/24/09 that Twitter turned down a $500M purchase offer. 

In mid-February a $35 million investment in Twitter at a $250M valuation made headlines.

On 3/4/09 Business Week did a feature article on the red hot 3-year-old, and that same day Motley Fool speculated that Eric Schmidt’s recent comments could mean Google will acquire Twitter soon.

The latest investment supposedly was too attractive to resist.

Twitter reportedly took in about $15 million back in June, 2008.  With the recent $35M and prior investments that comes to about $55 million invested so far.  Stay tuned to see if Motley Fool’s prediction is true.  Personally, I think they will be acquired by Google, but not so quickly.  Co-founder Evan Williams already sold his last business, the famous Blogger, to Google so he’s been there and done that.  He doesn’t likely need the money, but they know each other well.  I predict Twitter will hold out, grow as fast as possible and will probably take something in the range of a $1 to $2 billion offer within 18 months.

Twitter Has Potential Buyers Atwitter - Business Week - 3/4/09
As the microblogging service explodes in popularity, the suitors are lining up. Facebook has already made a play—others will likely follow.

Twitter Gets Help from Bezos - Business Week - 6/26/08
Funds from the Amazon founder and Spark Capital will help the “stressing” microblogging outfit rebuild its technology

An index of Business Week articles about Twitter can be found here.