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  • Community Conversation

    - by ultan o'broin
    Applications User Experience members (Erika Webb, Laurie Pattison, and I) attended the User Assistance Europe Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. We were impressed with the thought leadership and practical application of ideas in Anne Gentle's keynote address "Social Web Strategies for Documentation". After the conference, we spoke with Anne to explore the ideas further. Applications User Experience Senior Director Laurie Pattison (left) with Anne Gentle at the User Assistance Europe Conference In Anne's book called Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, she explains how user assistance is undergoing a seismic shift. The direction is away from the old print manuals and online help concept towards a web-based, user community-driven solution using social media tools. User experience professionals now have a vast range of such tools to start and nurture this "conversation": blogs, wikis, forums, social networking sites, microblogging systems, image and video sharing sites, virtual worlds, podcasts, instant messaging, mashups, and so on. That user communities are a rich source of user assistance is not a surprise, but the extent of available assistance is. For example, we know from the Consortium for Service Innovation that there has been an 'explosion' of user-generated content on the web. User-initiated community conversations provide as much as 30 times the number of official help desk solutions for consortium members! The growing reliance on user community solutions is clearly a user experience issue. Anne says that user assistance as conversation "means getting closer to users and helping them perform well. User-centered design has been touted as one of the most important ideas developed in the last 20 years of workplace writing. Now writers can take the idea of user-centered design a step further by starting conversations with users and enabling user assistance in interactions." Some of Anne's favorite examples of this paradigm shift from the world of traditional documentation to community conversation include: * Writer Bob Bringhurst's blog about Adobe InDesign and InCopy products and Adobe's community help * The Microsoft Development Network Community Center * ·The former Sun (now Oracle) OpenDS wiki, NetBeans Ruby and other community approaches to engage diverse audiences using screencasts, wikis, and blogs. * Cisco's customer support wiki, EMC's community, as well as Symantec and Intuit's approaches * The efforts of Ubuntu, Mozilla, and the FLOSS community generally Adobe Writer Bob Bringhurst's Blog Oracle is not without a user community conversation too. Besides the community discussions and blogs around documentation offerings, we have the My Oracle Support Community forums, Oracle Technology Network (OTN) communities, wiki, blogs, and so on. We have the great work done by our user groups and customer councils. Employees like David Haimes are reaching out, and enthusiastic non-employee gurus like Chet Justice (OracleNerd), Floyd Teter and Eddie Awad provide great "how-to" information too. But what does this paradigm shift mean for existing technical writers as users turn away from the traditional printable PDF manual deliverables? We asked Anne after the conference. The writer role becomes one of conversation initiator or enabler. The role evolves, along with the process, as the users define their concept of user assistance and terms of engagement with the product instead of having it pre-determined. It is largely a case now of "inventing the job while you're doing it, instead of being hired for it" Anne said. There is less emphasis on formal titles. Anne mentions that her own title "Content Stacker" at OpenStack; others use titles such as "Content Curator" or "Community Lead". However, the role remains one essentially about communications, "but of a new type--interacting with users, moderating, curating content, instead of sitting down to write a manual from start to finish." Clearly then, this role is open to more than professional technical writers. Product managers who write blogs, developers who moderate forums, support professionals who update wikis, rock star programmers with a penchant for YouTube are ideal. Anyone with the product knowledge, empathy for the user, and flair for relationships on the social web can join in. Some even perform these roles already but do not realize it. Anne feels the technical communicator space will move from hiring new community conversation professionals (who are already active in the space through blogging, tweets, wikis, and so on) to retraining some existing writers over time. Our own research reveals that the established proponents of community user assistance even set employee performance objectives for internal content curators about the amount of community content delivered by people outside the organization! To take advantage of the conversations on the web as user assistance, enterprises must first establish where on the spectrum their community lies. "What is the line between community willingness to contribute and the enterprise objectives?" Anne asked. "The relationship with users must be managed and also measured." Anne believes that the process can start with a "just do it" approach. Begin by reaching out to existing user groups, individual bloggers and tweeters, forum posters, early adopter program participants, conference attendees, customer advisory board members, and so on. Use analytical tools to measure the level of conversation about your products and services to show a return on investment (ROI), winning management support. Anne emphasized that success with the community model is dependent on lowering the technical and motivational barriers so that users can readily contribute to the conversation. Simple tools must be provided, and guidelines, if any, must be straightforward but not mandatory. The conversational approach is one where traditional style and branding guides do not necessarily apply. Tools and infrastructure help users to create content easily, to search and find the information online, read it, rate it, translate it, and participate further in the content's evolution. Recognizing contributors by using ratings on forums, giving out Twitter kudos, conference invitations, visits to headquarters, free products, preview releases, and so on, also encourages the adoption of the conversation model. The move to conversation as user assistance is not free, but there is a business ROI. The conversational model means that customer service is enhanced, as user experience moves from a functional to a valued, emotional level. Studies show a positive correlation between loyalty and financial performance (Consortium for Service Innovation, 2010), and as customer experience and loyalty become key differentiators, user experience professionals cannot explore the model's possibilities. The digital universe (measured at 1.2 million petabytes in 2010) is doubling every 12 to 18 months, and 70 percent of that universe consists of user-generated content (IDC, 2010). Conversation as user assistance cannot be ignored but must be embraced. It is a time to manage for abundance, not scarcity. Besides, the conversation approach certainly sounds more interesting, rewarding, and fun than the traditional model! I would like to thank Anne for her time and thoughts, and recommend that all user assistance professionals read her book. You can follow Anne on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/annegentle. Oracle's Acrolinx IQ deployment was used to author this article.

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  • Rockmelt, the technology adoption model, and Facebook's spare internet

    - by Roger Hart
    Regardless of how good it is, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to make snide remarks about Rockmelt. After all, on the surface it looks a lot like some people spent two years building a browser instead of just bashing out a Chrome extension over a wet weekend. It probably does some more stuff. I don't know for sure because artificial scarcity is cool, apparently, so the "invitation" is still in the post*. I may in fact never know for sure, because I'm not wild about Facebook sign-in as a prerequisite for anything. From the video, and some initial reviews, my early reaction was: I have a browser, I have a Twitter client; what on earth is this for? The answer, of course, is "not me". Rockmelt is, in a way, quite audacious. Oh, sure, on launch day it's Bay Area bar-chat for the kids with no lenses in their retro specs and trousers that give you deep-vein thrombosis, but it's not really about them. Likewise,  Facebook just launched Google Wave, or something. And all the tech snobbery and scorn packed into describing it that way is irrelevant next to what they're doing with their platform. Here's something I drew in MS Paint** because I don't want to get sued: (see: The technology adoption lifecycle) A while ago in the Guardian, John Lanchester dusted off the idiom that "technology is stuff that doesn't work yet". The rest of the article would be quite interesting if it wasn't largely about MySpace, and he's sort of got a point. If you bolt on the sentiment that risk-averse businessmen like things that work, you've got the essence of Crossing the Chasm. Products for the mainstream market don't look much like technology. Think for  a second about early (1980s ish) hi-fi systems, with all the knobs and fiddly bits, their ostentatious technophile aesthetic. Then consider their sleeker and less (or at least less conspicuously) functional successors in the 1990s. The theory goes that innovators and early adopters like technology, it's a hobby in itself. The rest of the humans seem to like magic boxes with very few buttons that make stuff happen and never trouble them about why. Personally, I consider Apple's maddening insistence that iTunes is an acceptable way to move files around to be more or less morally unacceptable. Most people couldn't care less. Hence Rockmelt, and hence Facebook's continued growth. Rockmelt looks pointless to me, because I aggregate my social gubbins with Digsby, or use TweetDeck. But my use case is different and so are my enthusiasms. If I want to share photos, I'll use Flickr - but Facebook has photo sharing. If I want a short broadcast message, I'll use Twitter - Facebook has status updates. If I want to sell something with relatively little hassle, there's eBay - or Facebook marketplace. YouTube - check, FB Video. Email - messaging. Calendaring apps, yeah there are loads, or FB Events. What if I want to host a simple web page? Sure, they've got pages. Also Notes for blogging, and more games than I can count. This stuff is right there, where millions and millions of users are already, and for what they need it just works. It's not about me, because I'm not in the big juicy area under the curve. It's what 1990s portal sites could never have dreamed of achieving. Facebook is AOL on speed, crack, and some designer drugs it had specially imported from the future. It's a n00b-friendly gateway to the internet that just happens to serve up all the things you want to do online, right where you are. Oh, and everybody else is there too. The price of having all this and the social graph too is that you have all of this, and the social graph too. But plenty of folks have more incisive things to say than me about the whole privacy shebang, and it's not really what I'm talking about. Facebook is maintaining a vast, and fairly fully-featured training-wheels internet. And it makes up a large proportion of the online experience for a lot of people***. It's the entire web (2.0?) experience for the early and late majority. And sure, no individual bit of it is quite as slick or as fully-realised as something like Flickr (which wows me a bit every time I use it. Those guys are good at the web), but it doesn't have to be. It has to be unobtrusively good enough for the regular humans. It has to not feel like technology. This is what Rockmelt sort of is. You're online, you want something nebulously social, and you don't want to faff about with, say, Twitter clients. Wow! There it is on a really distracting sidebar, right in your browser. No effort! Yeah - fish nor fowl, much? It might work, I guess. There may be a demographic who want their social web experience more simply than tech tinkering, and who aren't just getting it from Facebook (or, for that matter, mobile devices). But I'd be surprised. Rockmelt feels like an attempt to grab a slice of Facebook-style "Look! It's right here, where you already are!", but it's still asking the mature market to install a new browser. Presumably this is where that Facebook sign-in predicate comes in handy, though it'll take some potent awareness marketing to make it fly. Meanwhile, Facebook quietly has the entire rest of the internet as a product management resource, and can continue to give most of the people most of what they want. Something that has not gone un-noticed in its potential to look a little sinister. But heck, they might even make Google Wave popular.     *This was true last week when I drafted this post. I got an invite subsequently, hence the screenshot. **MS Paint is no fun any more. It's actually good in Windows 7. Farewell ironically-shonky diagrams. *** It's also behind a single sign-in, lending a veneer of confidence, and partially solving the problem of usernames being crummy unique identifiers. I'll be blogging about that at some point.

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  • Get Fanatical About Your Followers

    - by Mike Stiles
    In the fourth of our series of discussions with Aberdeen’s Trip Kucera, we touch on what fans of your brand have come to expect in exchange for their fandom. Spotlight: Around the Oracle Social office, we live for football. So when we think of a true “fan” of a brand, something on the level of a football fan is what comes to mind. But are brands trying to invest fans on that same level? Trip: Yeah, if you’re a football fan, this is definitely your time of year. And if you’ve been to any NFL games recently, especially if you hadn’t been for a few years previously, you may have noticed that from the cup holders to in-stadium Wi-Fi, there’s an increasing emphasis being placed on “fan-focused” accommodations. That’s what they’re known as in the stadium business. Spotlight: How are brands doing in that fan-focused arena? Trip: Remember fan is short for “fanatical.” Brands can definitely learn from the way teams have become fanatical about their fans, or in the social media world, their followers. Many companies consider a segment of their addressable social audience as true fans; I’ve even heard the term “super-fans” used. So just as fans know and can tell you nearly everything about their favorite team, our research shows that there’s a lot value from getting to know your social audience—your followers—at a deeper level. Spotlight: So did your research show there’s a lot to be gained by making fandom a two-way street? Trip: Aberdeen’s new social relationship management research suggests that companies should develop capabilities to better analyze their social audience at a more granular level. Countless “ripped from the headlines” examples, from “United Breaks Guitars” to the most recent British Airways social fiasco we talked about a few weeks ago show how social can magnify the impact of a single customer voice. Spotlight: So how do the companies who are executing social most successfully do that? Trip: Leaders, which are the top-performing companies in Aberdeen’s study, are showing the value of identifying and categorizing your social audience. You should certainly treat every customer as if they have 10,000 followers, because they just might, but you can also proactively engage with high-value customer and high-value influencers. Getting back to the football analogy, it’s like how teams strive to give every guest a great experience, but they really roll out the red carpet for those season ticket and luxury box holders. Spotlight: I’m not allowed in luxury boxes, so you’ll have to tell me what that’s like. But what is the brand equivalent of rolling out the red carpet? Trip: Leaders are nearly three times more likely than Followers to have a process in place that identifies key social influencers for engagement, and more than twice as likely to identify customer advocates for social outreach. This is the kind of knowledge that gives companies the ability to better target social messaging and promotions like we talked about in our last discussion, as well as a basis for understanding how to measure the impact of their social media programs. I’ll give you an example. I hosted an event at one of my favorite restaurants recently. I had mentioned them in a Tweet several weeks before the event, and on the day of the event, they Tweeted out that they were looking forward to seeing me that evening for the event. It’s a small thing, but it had a big impact and I’d certainly go back as a result. Spotlight: So what specifically can brands use and look at to determine where their potential super-fans are? Trip: Social graph analysis, which looks at both the demographic/psychographic trends as well as the behavioral connections, can surface important brand value. Aberdeen’s PR and Brand Management research indicated that top-performing companies are more than three times more likely than Followers to both determine demographic trends through social listening (44% vs. 13%), and to identify meaningful customer segments through social (44% vs. 12%). This kind of brand-level insight can complement and enrich traditional market research. But perhaps even more importantly, it can serve as an early warning system for customer experience failures. @mikestilesPhoto: freedigitalphotos.net

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  • Social Media Aggregator, Global Update via Powershell

    - by deanjmiller
    Does anyone know of a way to interface with a Social Media Aggregator using Powershell. For Instance, I would like to update my global status on digsby using Powershell. Digsby would then fan the message out to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Etc.. I am open to using any Social Media Aggregator that can do this.. Digsby, Seesmic, Ping.fm TweetDeek, etc.. If any of these programs have a com interface or something like it I'm sure who ever implements this first will have a large gain in users.

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  • What are interesting research questions with regards to open source software development? [closed]

    - by Aron Lindberg
    Imagine you have funding for a team of social scientists to study open source software development for a number of years (long time in software development, I know, but a short time for scientific research). These scientists have competencies to investigate psychological and sociological aspects of open source software development (i.e. how coders think, feel, and behave, along with how communities work or do not work). They are also technically equipped to understand code and coding, have access to all sorts of statistical and machine learning techniques, however their focus is on social aspects of open source software development, not technical. For you, as an open source software developer, what would be the research questions that would be interesting for you to have answered by such a group of scientists?

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  • Are people getting away with the "follow 1000s and then unfollow" Twitter trick? [closed]

    - by Baumr
    It seems that more and more people are trying to 'cheat' their way into more Twitter followers. The basic mechanism is: Follow thousands of people on Twitter with the hope that they'll follow you back. Once it reaches a point you're happy with, start gradually unfollowing them. That way, at the end of the day, it'll look like a lot of people follow you unconditionally. I've seen self-proclaimed social media and SEO experts do this. It's clear they want to look influential — and will use black hat social media tactics to do so. I can see how it can work, so is Twitter letting them get away with it? Should it?

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  • feedback for programming newbies looking to build a social networking site?

    - by kgardnr
    my partner and i are launching a social learning platform - the requirements have been mapped out and are quite basic/intuitive. we are familiar with html/css, and have some very basic understanding of php, but we would love some feedback on whether we should tackle this ourselves or not. we've built websites, but in the past relied mostly on pre-fab code, i.e. wordpress, ning, etc. we've been looking specifically at ruby for developing the network, but i haven't delved into it fully yet. we're looking for some guidance and feedback - e.g. thoughts on ruby on rails? what's the learning curve? are we getting in over our heads? thanks in advance!

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  • best-practices to block social sites

    - by adopilot
    In our company we have around 100 workstation with internet access, And day by day situation getting more worst and worst from perspective of using internet access for the purpose of doing private jobs, and wasting time on social sites. Open hearted I am not for blocking sites like Facebook, Youtube, and others similar but day by day my colleagues do not finishing his tasks and while I looking at their monitor all time they are ruining IE or Mozilla and chat and things like that. In other way Ill like to block youtube sometime when We have very poor internet access speed, Here is my questions: Do other companies blocking social sites ? Do I need dedicated device for that like hardware firewall, super expensive router Or I can do that whit my existing FreeBSD 6.1 self made router with two lan cards and configured nat to act like router. I was trying do that using ipfw and routerfirewall but without success, My code looks like ipfw add 25 deny tcp from 192.168.0.0/20 to www.facebook.com ipfw add 25 deny udp from 192.168.0.0/20 to www.facebook. ipfw add 25 deny tcp from 192.168.0.0/20 to www.dernek. ipfw add 25 deny udp from 192.168.0.0/20 to www.dernek. ipfw add 25 deny tcp from 192.168.0.0/20 to www.youtube. ipfw add 25 deny udp from 192.168.0.0/20 to www.youtube.com

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  • Social Media Java Design Problem

    - by jboyd
    I need to put something together quickly that will take blog posts and place them on social media sites, the requirements are as follows: Blog Entries are independent records that already exist, they have a published date and a modified date, the blog entry application cannot be changed, at least not substantially A new blog entry, or update needs to be sent to social media sites I currently do not need to update or delete social media communications if the blog entry is edited, or deleted, though I may need to later My design problems here are as follows: how do I know the status of each update how can I figure out what blog entry updates and postings have already been sent out? how can I quickly poll the blog entry table for postings that haven't yet been sent out? Avoiding looking at each Entry record from the DB as an object and asking if it's been sent already. That would be too slow. I cannot hook into any Blog Entry update code, my only option would be to create a trigger that an update queues something to be processed I'm looking for general guiding principles here, the biggest problem I'm having is coming up with any reasonable way to figure out if a blog entry should be sent to our social media sites in the first place

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  • Reference book on Ruby on Rails social network site for novices

    - by Christopher
    Hey, so I am a novice programmer who has only worked with HTML, CSS, and a touch of Java a couple of years ago. I am looking to try to get a social network site up and running on Ruby on Rails and was looking at RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) - Paperback (July 30, 2007) by Michael Hartl. This was published in 2007, however, and the newer reviews say it is not very helpful. Does anyone know if there are any new publications out there that walk you through building a social network site while teaching you the code(rather than just using a out of the box program)? Thanks

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  • Creating country specific twitter/facebook accounts

    - by user359650
    I see many companies that have an international presence trying to localize their social media presence by creating country or language specific accounts. However some seemed to have done so without following a consistent pattern, one example being the World Wildlife Fund when you look at their Twitter accounts: World_Wildlife : verified account with 200K followers WWF : main account with 800K followers www_uk : lower case with underscore between WWF and country indicator WWFCanada : upper case with country indicator attached to WWF ... I am planning to build a website which hopefully will grow global and would like to avoid this sort of inconsistencies. Also, I was comparing what Twitter and Facebook allow in their username and found out that they don't allow the same characters to be used (e.g. for instance that the former doesn't allow . whereas the latter does) making difficult to ensure consistency across social networks. Hence my questions: Are there known naming schemes for creating localized Twitter and Facebook accounts while maintaining a certain consistency between them (best effort)? Are there any researches out there that have proven whether some schemes were better than others in terms of readability and/or SEO?

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  • Social Targeting: Who Do You Think You’re Talking To?

    - by Mike Stiles
    Are you the kind of person that tries to sell Clay Aiken CD’s outside Warped Tour concert venues? Then you don’t think a lot about targeting your messages to the right audience. For your communication to pack the biggest punch it can, you need to know where to throw it. And a recent study on social demographics might help you see social targeting in a whole new light. Pingdom’s annual survey of social network demographics shows us first of all that there is no gender difference between Facebook and Twitter. Both are 40% male, 60% female. If you’re looking for locales that lean heavily male, that would be Slashdot, Hacker News and Stack Overflow. The women are dominating Pinterest, Goodreads and Blogger. So what about age? 55% of tweeters are 35 and up, compared with 63% at Pinterest, 65% at Facebook and 70% at LinkedIn. As you can tell, LinkedIn supports the oldest user base, with the average member being 44. The average age at Facebook is 51, and it’s 37 at Twitter. If you want to aim younger, have you met Orkut yet? 83% of its users are under 35. The next sites in order as great candidates for the young market are deviantART, Hacker News, Hi5, Github, and Reddit. I know, other than Reddit, many of you might be saying “who?” But the list could offer an opportunity to look at the vast social world beyond Facebook, Twitter and Google+ (which Pingdom did not include in the survey at all due to a lack of accessible data). As for the average age of social users overall: 26% are 25-34 25% are 35-44 19% are 45-54 16% are 18-24  6% are 55-64  5% are 0-17  and 2% are 65 Now you know where you stand on the “cutting edge” scale for a person your age. You’re welcome. Certainly such demographics are a moving target and need to be watched and reassessed on a regular basis to make sure you’re moving in step with the people you want to talk to. For instance, since Pingdom’s survey last year, the age of the average Facebook user has gone up 2 years, while the age of the average Twitter user has gone down 2 years. With the targeting and analytics tools available on today’s social management platforms, there’s little need to market in the dark. Otherwise, good luck with those Clay CD’s.

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  • What Does Google Social Search Mean For Website Optimisation?

    Google's latest output, Social Search, allows users to search for information via their personal connections on Twitter and other networking sites. With social search rapidly growing in popularity, the idea is basically to get the input of a user's friends, rather than anonymous websites. Social search results are incorporated right into those of a normal search engine results page (SERP) similar to how images, videos and other content are currently integrated into regular listings.

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  • In Case You Weren’t There: Blogwell NYC

    - by Mike Stiles
    0 0 1 1009 5755 Vitrue 47 13 6751 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} Your roving reporter roved out to another one of Socialmedia.org’s fantastic Blogwell events, this time in NYC. As Central Park and incredible weather beckoned, some of the biggest brand names in the world gathered to talk about how they’re incorporating social into marketing and CRM, as well as extending social across their entire organizations internally. Below we present a collection of the live tweets from many of the key sessions GE @generalelectricJon Lombardo, Leader of Social Media COE How GE builds and extends emotional connections with consumers around health and reaps the benefits of increased brand equity in the process. GE has a social platform around Healthyimagination to create better health for people. If you and a friend are trying to get healthy together, you’ll do better. Health is inherently. Get health challenges via Facebook and share with friends to achieve goals together. They’re creating an emotional connection around the health context. You don’t influence people at large. Your sphere of real influence is around 5-10 people. They find relevant conversations about health on Twitter and engage sounding like a friend, not a brand. Why would people share on behalf of a brand? Because you tapped into an activity and emotion they’re already having. To create better habits in health, GE gave away inexpensive, relevant gifts related to their goals. Create the context, give the relevant gift, get social acknowledgment for giving it. What you get when you get acknowledgment for your engagement and gift is user generated microcontent. GE got 12,000 unique users engaged and 1400 organic posts with the healthy gift campaign. The Dow Chemical Company @DowChemicalAbby Klanecky, Director of Digital & Social Media Learn how Dow Chemical is finding, training, and empowering their scientists to be their storytellers in social media. There are 1m jobs coming open in science. Only 200k are qualified for them. Dow Chemical wanted to use social to attract and talk to scientists. Dow Chemical decided to use real scientists as their storytellers. Scientists are incredibly passionate, the key ingredient of a great storyteller. Step 1 was getting scientists to focus on a few platforms, blog, Twitter, LinkedIn. Dow Chemical social flow is Core Digital Team - #CMs – ambassadors – advocates. The scientists were trained in social etiquette via practice scenarios. It’s not just about sales. It’s about growing influence and the business. Dow Chemical trained about 100 scientists, 55 are active and there’s a waiting list for the next sessions. In person social training produced faster results and better participation. Sometimes you have to tell pieces of the story instead of selling your execs on the whole vision. Social Media Ethics Briefing: Staying Out of TroubleAndy Sernovitz, CEO @SocialMediaOrg How do we get people to share our message for us? We have to have their trust. The difference between being honest and being sleazy is disclosure. Disclosure does not hurt the effectiveness of your marketing. No one will get mad if you tell them up front you’re a paid spokesperson for a company. It’s a legal requirement by the FTC, it’s the law, to disclose if you’re being paid for an endorsement. Require disclosure and truthfulness in all your social media outreach. Don’t lie to people. Monitor the conversation and correct misstatements. Create social media policies and training programs. If you want to stay safe, never pay cash for social media. Money changes everything. As soon as you pay, it’s not social media, it’s advertising. Disclosure, to the feds, means clear, conspicuous, and understandable to the average reader. This phrase will keep you in the clear, “I work for ___ and this is my personal opinion.” Who are you? Were you paid? Are you giving an honest opinion based on a real experience? You as a brand are responsible for what an agency or employee or contactor does in your behalf. SocialMedia.org makes available a Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit. Socialmedia.org/disclosure. The point is to not ethically mess up and taint social media as happened to e-mail. Not only is the FTC cracking down, so is Google and Facebook. Visa @VisaNewsLucas Mast, Senior Business Leader, Global Corporate Social Media Visa built a mobile studio for the Olympics for execs and athletes. They wanted to do postcard style real time coverage of Visa’s Olympics sponsorships, and on a shoestring. Challenges included Olympic rules, difficulty getting interviews, time zone trouble, and resourcing. Another problem was they got bogged down with their own internal approval processes. Despite all the restrictions, they created and published a variety of and fair amount of content. They amassed 1000+ views of videos posted to the Visa Communication YouTube channel. Less corporate content yields more interest from media outlets and bloggers. They did real world video demos of how their products work in the field vs. an exec doing a demo in a studio. Don’t make exec interview videos dull and corporate. Keep answers short, shoot it in an interesting place, do takes until they’re comfortable and natural. Not everything will work. Not everything will get a retweet. But like the lottery, you can’t win if you don’t play. Promoting content is as important as creating it. McGraw-Hill Companies @McGrawHillCosPatrick Durando, Senior Director of Global New Media McGraw-Hill has 26,000 employees. McGraw-Hill created a social intranet called Buzz. Intranets create operational efficiency, help product dev, facilitate crowdsourcing, and breaks down geo silos. Intranets help with talent development, acquisition, retention. They replaced the corporate directory with their own version of LinkedIn. The company intranet has really cut down on the use of email. Long email threats become organized, permanent social discussions. The intranet is particularly useful in HR for researching and getting answers surrounding benefits and policies. Using a profile on your company intranet can establish and promote your internal professional brand. If you’re going to make an intranet, it has to look great, work great, and employees are going have to want to go there. You can’t order them to like it. 

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  • PHP API for access social networks

    - by War Coder
    hello guys, am looking for a php api that can access social networks like facebook,myspace,orkut and so many more of them. I should be able to upload pictures and videos to my favourite social networking account and also post get updates from thems, change status, make comments and similar stuffs. Just wondering if there is anything like that or similar to it. Thanks.

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  • Can you Trust Search?

    - by David Dorf
    An awful lot of referrals to e-commerce sites come from web searches. Retailers rely on search engine optimization (SEO) to correctly position their website so they can be found. Search on "blue jeans" and the results are determined by a semi-secret algorithm -- in my case Levi.com, Banana Republic, and ShopStyle show up. The NY Times recently uncovered a situation where JCPenney, via third-parties hired to help with SEO, was caught manipulating search results so they were erroneously higher in page rankings. No doubt this helped drive additional sales during this part Christmas. The article, The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, is well worth reading. My friend Ron Kleinman started an interesting discussion at the ARTS Linkedin forum. He posed the question: The ability of a single company to "punish" any retailer (by significantly impacting their on-line sales volume) who does not play by their rules ... is this a good thing or a bad thing? Clearly JCP was in the wrong and needed to be punished, but should that decision lie with Google alone? Don't get me wrong -- I'm certainly not advocating we create a Department of Search where bureaucrats think of ways to spend money, but Google wields an awful lot of power in this situation, and it makes me feel uncomfortable. Now Google is incorporating more social aspects into their search results. For example, when Google knows its me (i.e. I'm logged in when using Google) search results will be influenced by my Twitter network. In an effort to increase relevance, the blogs and re-tweeted articles from my network will be higher in the search results than they otherwise would be. So in the case of product searches, things discussed in my network will rise to the top. Continuing my blue jean example, if someone in my network had been discussing Macy's perhaps they would now be higher in the result set. soapbox: I already have lots of spammers posting bogus comments to this blog in an effort to create additional links to their sites and thus increase their search ranking. Should I expect a similar situation in Twitter and eventually Facebook? Now retailers need to expand their SEO efforts to incorporate social media as well, but do us all a favor and please don't cheat.

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  • Can I use silverlight for building SocialNetworking applicaiton?

    - by dimmV
    Hi all, I am wondering: how feasible it would be to start developing a social networking website entirely based on silverlight; This has been fairly discussed over the years in favor of HTML. Has something changed with silverlight improvements over the years? What about: * Performance -- active users -- technology used, MVVM + MEF (possibility of lags, server memory overflow...) * Security --- WCF Ria Services & EF What are your thoughts on this subject?

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  • How to host a scalable social networking app

    - by christopher-mccann
    I am in the middle of developing a social networking application for a very select user niche which could scale to a few million users. Right now I have always hosted applications on RackSpace Cloud and I have no issues with them at all - always been a really good service and never had any downtime. My question is though does anyone think that cloud computing is not the way to host scalable web apps? Or can anyone with experience of this recommend a better solution. I have always shunned trying to run big servers from my own facilities as I think it seems silly to go to the expense of bringing in big alternative power supplies and all the other necessary precautions when other companies already do this. I looked at managed hosting services but this proved to be a bit too expensive for us at the start and the scalability of it wasnt good enough - it would take a day or two to get a new server provisioned. Therefore I ended up on a cloud platform. If anyone has any recommendations or advice it would be greatly appreciated.

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