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.
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.
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.
What is Twitter? Hear what co-founder Ev Williams has to say about it at TED, one of the most interesting conferences in the world.
Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter, explains how Twitter came to be and how it continues to surprise him as it evolves. Since it’s beginnings in the latter 1990’s The TED conference puts the most interesting people in the fields of technology, education, and design on stage before some of the smartest and most influential audiences.
It’s still early, but I am convinced Twitter is a major phenomenon, not just a fad. In fact it could be revolutionary. Twitter is a new medium cobbled together from various preexisting parts that is much more than the sum of those parts.
The phenomenon is hard to grasp at first, but that has no effect on it’s significance or it’s potential to revolutionize the way people interact.
This isn’t as revolutionary as the web itself was, but it’s way up on the list. Just how high Twitter will rank will be determined over the next 3 to 5 years as it spreads it’s tentacles into our connected lives.
I like to watch the frontiers of technology for new developments and I like to see if I can predict the effects those will have over time. I started doing this way back when the first PCs were being marketed. Not the IBM variety. I’m taking the S100 bus and forward, but that’s another story. (That was in the late 70’s during my college years.)
As a software engineer and then as a development manager, I always wanted to know where things were going. I wanted to be sure our systems didn’t just meet current needs, but predictable future needs as well. As they say “don’t go to where the ball is, go to where the ball is going to be”.
During the 80’s I was working in a large company whose applications were based on mainframes. I was always working to bridge the gap to PCs. I watched as the PC revolution came through and peaked. I felt left behind. I focused on Windows-based systems, but I wondered if there would ever be another boom like the one that drove the PC. After some consideration I figured that the pace of change was only accelerating so there should be at least one or two more major waves of change before I hit retirement. Boy, was that right.
This interest in the future is what led to me starting my first major venture called Web Access in January of 1995. The Mosaic browser that ignited the web boom, was just 6 months old at the time but I could see the potential. I spent the next year evangelizing and educating people about the potential of the web and the rest is history. The web grew from a tiny swell to a tsunami of unparalleled proportions in record time.
Now we have Twitter. It’s not as revolutionary as the web, but I see all the markings of a major innovation with far-reaching effects. I will do more blogging to help explain the Twitter phenomenon and it’s potential.
Stats released in November 2008 confirm that the influence of Mass Media is declining steadily due to the Internet in general and social media is accelerating the pace.
“Peer-to-peer authority is replacing mass media on all fronts. As information sources, family and friends’ advice rose from 44% to 47% as an information source, while coworker advice went from 23% to 30%.“
From 2006 to 2008 the mass media numbers are eroding steadily while social media is rising rapidly. This is a classic pattern. Think ‘buggy whips’.
Magazines down from 23% ro 18%.
TV done from 71% to 65%.
The only traditional media category that rose is Cable TV News - up from 47% to 49%.
But Social Newtorking site interaction grew by 98% during the same period.
(Source: Ketchum Global Media Network and Global Research Network partnered with the University of Southern California Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center on this study.)
This is the continuation of a trend that started with the advent of the Web. Newspaper readership dropped from 58% in 1998 to 52% in 2005. That decline is accelerating. Young people now prefer to read news online and never acquire the newspaper habit.
Personally, I never learned to appreciate newspapers. They are bulky, dirty, and generally inconvenient. I can read the New York Times on my laptop or iPhone much more efficiently, and easily. I can start reading during my morning routine, and can continue whenever I have a few minutes of down time on my iPhone, or my laptop. Plus, now I can get better news from bloggers which are focused on the subjects I care about.
What only 20? Well, it’s 20 really good reasons. Seriously, study this post. It covers all the keys.
This list of 20 reasons is a great primer for anyone who’s trying to understand social media. It covers all of the key subject areas. These are just the headings. To read the full post click the link at the end. (I’ve underlined the bits that I think are most important.)
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Branding
Create a buzz
Online reputation management
Establish yourself as an expert
Word of mouth
Build relationships and become more personal
Open up the line of communication between business owner and millions of potential customers
Small businesses can compete with the large companies
Social networking with potential clients and customers from all over the globe
Get great traffic- Not only great traffic…. but freakishly crazy amounts of traffic.
Increase your link-ability
Helps with search engines -Link juice from a quality site = higher ranking in the search engines.
Much cheaper than traditional marketing and advertising
Your company is more accessible - An accessible company means a more trustworthy company.
Direct conversation to a specific niche - There are so many social networking, social bookmarking, and social news sites that are dedicated to specific niches. You have the ability to speak directly to these people and not have all the other noise of unrelated topics getting in the way. If you are speaking their language, you have a better chance of them actually hearing what you are saying - and you’re getting the RIGHT KIND of following.
Provides another way for potential customers to find you - If you’re not high enough in the search engines for potential customers to find you, they can still find you through social media. So, even if you’re not on the front page of Google, it doesn’t mean you can’t receive traffic. Social Media has the potential to send you TONS of traffic - when done properly (I’ll write more on that soon!).
It’s a way to explainyourself - One of the reasons some businesses are skiddish about social media is because they’re afraid of negative comments. It’s possible to receive negative comments. But, social media provides the platform to explain, to make things right. The fact of the matter is - if someone has something negative to say they can say it. Ignoring them doesn’t stop the damage. But, when you reply, you are seen as a business owner who cares, who wants to make the customer happy, and that you’re human. Social media is a two-way conversation, so go ahead and defend yourself - just do it proactively.
Show Your Stuff
Find out exactly what your customers want - Social media is amazing in so many ways, as you can see from the last 18 reasons. But, what is so cool is that you don’t have to wonder what your customers want. You want to know what they want?Ask them on social media, and they’ll tell you.
Your customers can play an active role in the business - Instead of focus groups, let your customers play an active role in your business. Let them offer suggestions, let them share their likes and dislikes - all on social media. You might find yourself ideas for new products and services you’d never have without them.
Bottom line - marketing is about getting out the word, engaging in conversations, taking suggestions, problem solving, educating your audience, and promoting your company, product, or service. One of the best ways for small businesses to create buzz is through social media.
Social PR expert Brian Solis’ Conversation Prism is a great overview of the rapidly expanding Social Media space.
This is a simplistic, but very attractive overview. It’s a good start, but it doesn’t help with understanding, and in the few months since it’s original publication in August, 2008 it’s aready a bit dated.. In any case, this attractive graphic has become very popular in slide decks.
Brian breaks the Social Spectrum down into the following groups of tools, services, communities, and networks:
Ben Huh, the guy behind ICanHasCheezBurger.com, created a community which now numbers over 1 million unique visitors a month, all from funny cat pictures with captions. I kid you not. He knows what he’s talking about. His monthly uniques almost tripled in 2008.
How did he do it? Well, here are 15 of his top tips.
One of the web’s most unique sites also comes with the most unusual name, I Can Has Cheezburger (dot-com). The name comes from one of the captions on the jillions of crazy cat pictures found on the site. You can browse the pictures, copy them to your site/blog/profile, or create your own funny caption in 3 easy steps. (And remember cats have poor grammar and spelling abilities.)
Ben knows what he’s talking about. Here is a summary of his 15 keys to building a community. The link to the full post is at the bottom.
1. Convert Casual Users into Fans
The number one rule of creating a great community is to enable people to share the positive experience that they’ve had on your site. Your aim should be to convert casual users into fans because fans are the ones that will share your content with others.
2. Love on Your Existing Fans, but Not Too Much
3. Empower your Users
4. Make More People Happy
5. Stop Engineering and Start Thinking About the Market
6. Don’t Skimp on Great Content
7. Provide Ways to Give Feedback
8. Power of Little
Offer users lots of small, simple things to do on your site that don’t require login, such as rating, commenting, saving a favorite, creating an account and finally (hopefully) they will do the most difficult thing of all, contribute to your site.
9. Encourage ‘Thefting’
10. Be Willing to Prune Your Community
11. Measure the Number of Shared Experiences, not Users
12. Shared Experiences = Goodwill
13. Create Info Porn
People love to look at data about themselves. It the reason why there is a mirror in practically every elevator that you’ve been in. If you have data about your user’s behavior on your site then show it to them. Update it on a daily basis and they will come back on a daily basis. One of the most popular pages on Lol cats is the page that tells people how many ‘fans’ they have.
14. Don’t Pay Contributors
15. Don’t Confuse Sharing with Marketing
When your users share content with others they are not marketing. They don’t even think about it in that way and in turn you shouldn’t treat them as marketers. Don’t force marketing messages at them, it will burn their trust.
That’s a question many organizations are starting to ask. The answer is a definite no (unless you ignore it).
On the contrary, social media will ensure your company and its web site stay relevant. The days of the one-way conversation are numbered. If you aren’t engaging your prospected and constituents, you are missing the boat.
The social revolution is well under way and the ‘social divide’ is growing rapidly. Sites that have social/community features like blogs, user commenting, discussion forums, user ratings, user recommendations, and such will be at the forefront and will dominate mindshare in their categories. Sites that lack such features will increasingly be considered out-of-date.
The younger generations can barely relate to non-social media. They are so used to being connected that non-social web sites are the ‘dead sites’.
Senior marketing executives in several countries agree that the use of social media for corporate, brand and product marketing is not a passing fad - with nearly half saying it is a vital component - according to research sponsored by TNS media intelligence/Cymfony.
Social Media is a major trend. You can't afford to ignore it.
Many people have no clue about what Social Media is and how it can benefit their business. This basic primer will help clear things up a lot.
In case you might have missed it, there is a lot going on today in what's been generally termed 'Social Media'. As you may know if you've read the other content on our site, we feel this isn't just a little trend, it's a major revolution. We foresaw this day coming, we just didn't think it would happen so quickly.
Let's start with a quick definition of what is making the web 'social'. If you look at when online conversations started, it was before the web itself. It started with Prodigy and CompuServ, and things like IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Then came AOL and chat rooms. It started with services that had forums and chat. When the web started forums were kind of slow to catch on, but it was inevitable. The web needed to grow up a bit first.
When the web started, in 1994, it wasn't social at all. All the sites were about telling or selling. Then came online reviews. Sites like Amazon invited people to write reviews of books and products in general. Amazon saw the power of social media very early on and they have been a leader ever since.
During all this many different web-based forum systems came into being. Most people would not know their names, and only a few like PHPBB (PHP Bulletin Board) are even moderatly well-know in web tech circles. But forums proliferated. They even generated a variety of 'super-forums' like YahooGroups. These enabled groups of people to gather, converse, and share info.
Amazon innovated in the area of user opinions and review further by letting you give a simple thumbs up or down for each review or comment. Now we had opinions of opinions. And it added even more value.
Then came the first wave of Social Networking. Yeah, I know it seems out of place on the timeline here, but that's because the initial social networking sites took a while to catch on, and they were eclipsed by later sites that got the formula right. These early sites were things like Plaxo, and Classmates.com, then came services like Friendster and Tribe. Those sites created a little stir, but it wasn't until several years later that MySpace came along that the true potential of social networking started to become apparent.
Next came blogging. People started sharing their thoughts and opinions in what were initially called web logs, and this got shortened to the term 'blogs'. Blogs weren't inherently social, but the early bloggers weren't just blogging, a few were creating platforms or applicaitons for blogging, and they added the ability for readers to comment. That is when blogs became a cornerstone of social media. These blogs generated micro-communities around the blog's topic(s) and the online 'social revolution' really started to pick up speed. Early blogging platforms included services like Blogger which was acquired by Google. Blogging really started to hit a chord when WordPress was born.
The blog wave created a whole group of new online publications or online magazines like TechCrunch, Engadget, and Mashable. These are now major media properties which originally started as simple blogs.
Then came content sharing. Sites like YouTube and Flickr allowed people to upload things and share them with friends and the whole world in general. Not only did they let you share content, they let your visitors comment on that content and rate it. This made YouTube. The fact that you could tell what other people were watching the most, and you could see what was rated highly, enabled people to filter through the mountains of junk and find the few gems. And the fact that people could register their own opinions of the content, was very engaging.
Another key area of content sharing was brought to the fore by link sharing sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us. These let you share interesting news stories, or web sites with friends and the general public.
All of these personal thoughts, and opinions, and comments, and ratings, and rankings, are a big part of social media, but they are not the whole picture. A big part of the picture is semi-hidden. It's the communities of people with common interests. This aspect is somewhat invisible because it's implied, but make no mistake, even though it's not as obivious or readily apparent, it IS a huge part of the magic of social media. Finding people like yourself, and sharing new discoveries is incredibly valuable. It's how things spread in the real world, and it's a huge part of the value online.
Lastly, I have to mention the newest wave in the social revolution, micro-blogging. Services like Twitter are taking the online conversation to a whole new level.
And there is more to 'social media' like online games, and virtual worlds, but this post was only meant to be a primer and I will leave those for another time.
What should you do?
First, I recommend you create a blog. Originally, blogs were mainly about sharing personal insights, and interesting stuff found around the web. Then it grew to become more communal, in that readers were invited to comment. This creates a dialog and is very engaging and creates a micro-community.
Next, I recommend you add forums. These will snowball as your posts, and your follower's posts and conversations attract even more followers. This is not easy, but it’s not extremely difficult either.
Whether you go the forum route or not, part of the benefit of a blog is that the search engines value new content very highly and it bumps your search rankings significantly. Any regularly updated or new content will boost your ranking in the search engine results.
If you have any questions, contact us.We're here to help.
Social Media is with us to stay, so how do you manage your brand message effectively? Control yourself.
You can't avoid the social media tsunami. Your prospects, your customers, your employees, and your detractors, all have access. In the past you could carefully control your brand message, yet even then a problem would occasionally crop up that would test the best PR skills. Today you have to step up to a much higher level.
Today's web society is used to an active conversation and it's not always civil. How you respond reveals a lot about your organization and its culture. Everything you say and do should be treated like a public conversation. It's a conversation that's right there in writing for all to read. You need tact, diplomacy, and restraint. You can't control what someone says to you or about you, but you can control how you respond.
You need policies. You need awareness. You need social skills.
In the past your brand could have more of a one-way message. Today, you need to be ready to respond effectively. You can't stop negativity, but you can control the conversation by how you respond.
In early 2008, Comcast realized they had a problem when people were posting negative info about their service online. Most brands would run for the hills, bury their head, or call their attorneys. Comcast tackled it head on and won. They put a team of customer service people on it. They contacted the disgruntled customers directly online, and they addressed their problems. This resulted in a lot of positive results. These customers who were willing to complain publicly, were also willing to report their newfound admiration for Comcast publicly.
Today, many other brands are monitoring what the public is saying and responding. They use various search tools to check on postings at places like twitter, and Facebook. They use those same tools to get a
And real-world, off-line efforts often make their way back to the online conversations too. GoDaddy recently started a campaign of proactively calling customers to see if they needed any help with anything. I got one of these calls myself. I was very impressed. They actually helped me trim some unneeded services and save some money! They also helped me figure out a feature that I had wanted to use, but did not have the time to explore. All at no charge. I was very impressed.
Then I noticed a major online personality posted a message on Twitter recounting the same experience. Now that's the way to handle customer service in the era of social media.
Like Ice Cream? Well, not exactly, but this video definitely helps explain the concept of Social Media.
It's not the best explanation, but it helps. The main message is that social media brings social behaviors like recommendations from friends to the online world. We all like to get and give recommendations, and the more we hear about something from others, the more likely we are to check it out. Also, social media allows niche interests to find each other. "Oh, you like pistachio ice cream too?"
If you still aren't sure about what Social Media is, and if you have 4 minutes to spare, this will help.
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. 
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. 
3) 
On 3/4/09 Business Week did 
Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter, explains how Twitter came to be and how it continues to surprise him as it evolves. Since it’s beginnings in the latter 1990’s The TED conference puts the most interesting people in the fields of technology, education, and design on stage before some of the smartest and most influential audiences.
The phenomenon is hard to grasp at first, but that has no effect on it’s significance or it’s potential to revolutionize the way people interact. 
From 2006 to 2008 the mass media numbers are eroding steadily while social media is rising rapidly. This is a classic pattern. Think ‘buggy whips’.
This is just a summation. For the original post and comments check this link to the 
This list of 20 reasons is a great primer for anyone who’s trying to understand social media. It covers all of the key subject areas. These are just the headings. To read the full post click the link at the end. (I’ve underlined the bits that I think are most important.)
In case you might have missed it, there is a lot going on today in what's been generally termed 'Social Media'. As you may know if you've read the other content on our site, we feel this isn't just a little trend, it's a major revolution. We foresaw this day coming, we just didn't think it would happen so quickly.
You can't avoid the social media tsunami. Your prospects, your customers, your employees, and your detractors, all have access. In the past you could carefully control your brand message, yet even then a problem would occasionally crop up that would test the best PR skills. Today you have to step up to a much higher level.