Portals and KM

Tweetzup Creates a Blogger Page

Going into 2014 I remain very much a part of Darwin Ecosystem and excited about our latest offering, Tweetzup. The Darwin’s organic temporal curation engine improves Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking by including in real-time collections of correlated tags (Keyword Memes) from current tweets -- You have seen them in action on our tweetzup.com and TheEnergyPulse.com sites. Here is a post on Darwin Ecosystem’s Keyword Memes™ Drawn From Tweets.

Now they have introduced a Blogger Page. It allows you to follow topics that you are interested. I created a page for the hash tag #nola – for my home town New Orleans. It is hash tag I follow in Tweet deck but is hard to get an overview as tweets flash by. With Tweetzup you can see and explore trending topics. Below is a screen shot of the hash tag on December 6. The major topics of that day centered around the re-trail of NOPD officer David Warren in the shooting and subsequent cover up of Henry Glover’s death. This makes sense. This real life event was also part of the story line in the excellent HBO series Treme. 

For more information, please contact our CEO, Thierry Hubert, directly as we are seeking strategic clients and alliances to bring this next-generation SEO improvement innovation to the market. You can reach him at [email protected]. 

Improve Your SEO with Darwin Ecosystem’s Keyword Memes™ Drawn From Tweets

I remain very much a part of Darwin Ecosystem and excited about our latest offering, Keyword Memes™. The Darwin’s organic temporal curation engine improves Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ranking by including in real-time collections of correlated tags (Keyword Memes) from current tweets -- You have seen them in action on our tweetzup.com and TheEnergyPulse.com sites. Below is the Tweetzup site.

Here also is the Energy Pulse site as an industry focused example of the technology.

Our newly announced API harvests the correlated keywords associated with the movement of tweets to deliver Keyword Memes that can be added to your web pages’ meta data. These Keyword Memes provide clustered keywords that are representative of the crowd's current association with the keywords that best complement the topic of your web pages. 

Our API increases relevance based on emerging social expressions. Our temporal curation algorithm and engine allows us to produce these Keyword Memes on demand and without manual input and costly research.

Darwin Ecosystem now offers Keyword Memes for SEO solutions through our API subscription and integration services.  Companies interested in complementing and improving their search engine pages’ ranking can now be relevant to what matters based on people’s correlated expressions.

This is a strong contrast from today’s SEO spamming practices that only seek keywords that are highly ranked regardless of their relevance to your pages’ content. Search engines know this and seek to penalize pages using this misleading practice. Darwin’s approach combats this risk as our tags are automatically correlated, unbiased and truly relevant to the expressed interest of the moment.



For more information, please contact our CEO, Thierry Hubert, directly as we are seeking strategic clients and alliances to bring this next-generation SEO improvement innovation to the market. You can reach him at [email protected]. 

College Presidents Blog and Tweet Much More Than Corporate CEO’s

Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research have published an on going series of studies of social media in both business and higher education. Nora and Ava Lescault recently published an interesting report, College Presidents Out-Blog and Out-Tweet Corporate CEO’s 
as Higher Ed Delves Deeper into Social Media to Recruit Students.  This latest study (2012-2013) analyzes the most recent trending of social media adoption among four-year accredited institutions in the United States. A proportional sample of schools in all 50 states was utilized resulting in 26% public schools, 71% private and 2% describing themselves as “for profit institutions.”  They range in size from 40 to over 37,000 undergraduates.

The highlights included the finding that over half of college presidents studied are posting on Facebook (58%) and tweeting (55%), while 35% host their own blog. In comparison, 40% of Inc. 500 CEO’s are on Facebook along with only 8% of Fortune 500 CEO’s.  Twenty-nine percent of Inc. 500 CEO’s tweet and only 4% of the Fortune 500 CEO’s tweet.  Seven Inc. 500 CEO’s host a blog and only 1 Fortune 500 CEO has a blog.

 

Schools also show an interest in new tools including Pinterest (31% adoption), Google+ (25% adoption) and Instagram (16% adoption). Over two-thirds of US colleges and universities have some official school blogging activity on their campus.  Forty-one percent of school officials believe they can directly attribute an increase in enrollments to their social media efforts.

Some schools (30%) report spending less on printing, newspaper ads (23%), television (17%) and radio (16%) as a result of increased online presence. Thirteen percent of schools report researching students through their social networking sites as part of the admissions process.  Last year 19% made this claim. Thirty-eight percent of school officials reported they monitored the internet for buzz, posts, conversations and news about their institution, the fifth straight decline since 2009 when 73% reported monitoring their school’s name online.

Even though there is enormous activity, much of it by students, half of the schools surveyed report that they do not have written guidelines for acceptable online behavior. This needs to change. It is great to see this ongoing research in social media. I look forward to more. 

Darwin Ecosystems Moves Forward with Tweetzup

It has been almost a year since I reported on Darwin Ecosystems at the 2012 SF TechCrunch Disrupt where it won the 2012 SAP Big Data Start-up of the Year award for its Tweather offering. This latest achievement goes along with its win of the KM World Trend Setting Product in both 2011 and 2010 and the Most Promising Software award in 2010. Darwin was also named to the 100 companies that matter in 2010 by both KM World and eContent Magazine.

Since TechCrunch Disrupt Darwin has been hard at work and have dramatically improved on its new site, now called TweetZup, as well as its mission.  I am still connected to Darwin and excited about what is happening.

TweetZup’s real value is to give users the ability to discover content that is emerging.  What better source than Twitter to do that? In fact, Twitter has been great for self-promotion and pushing content out, but it lacks in offering a comprehensive discovery of what is emerging. No wonder why they are having a hard time with advertisement since they have not really developed user’s receptiveness to content. Instead brands and companies have been the real consumer of Twitter content, not the every day user.

 

Darwin has created www.tweetzup.com as a truly dedicated site to see what is emerging right now about topics that you may care about. Furthermore, you can create alerts for emerging themes of interest. These alerts can be pushed on your behalf to your twitter account, or be sent to you via email. Tweetzup also correlates the emerging twitter themes to find the most relevant videos. It is search without search offering true contextual discovery.  You can drill down to explore a topic, like art, with suggestions or determine your own preferences. 

 

We all know that search engines do a poor job at revealing what we don’t know, and therefore it is hard to know what you are missing.

The Tweetzup service is free and in Beta. But please feel free to play with it, create your own ZUPs (queries), set alerts, and share your finding.

Also know that Darwin is about to publish an API that will allow developers to tap into its temporal curation intervals, This capability is what allows the tag and clustering animation on the site, to performs tasks such as trend-based SEO, analytics, and predictive computing. A service/user can extract the metadata and improve their SEO by adding KW to their content that reflects the trending and associated keywords. See Thierry Hubert’s recent post, Announcing our new Emerging Organic Metadata Tags for SEO API for more details. 

In an effort to support the protection of our homeland, Darwin has created several pages where you can start to see what topics are emerging relating to terror threats.  You can also create your own alerts when keywords of interest are piping-up in significant numbers over different periods of time.  The URL is http://www.tweetzup.com/tw/home/home?filter=Terror%20Threat  or go to www.tweetzup.com and select the Terror Threat category.  You can also create your own topics to monitor by registration via a twitter account. It is a free and open website.

2013 Fortune 500 Expand and Branch Out in Social Media: Google+, Instagram, Foursquare and Pinterest

Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth have released another of their very useful studies: 2013 Fortune 500 Are Bullish on Social Media:
Big Companies Get Excited About Google+, Instagram,
 Foursquare and Pinterest. For this work they looked at social media use by all 500 of the 2013 Fortune 500 companies. The types included blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, Google+, Foursquare and Instagram were added for the first time this year.

I always find their work especially valuable as they have been doing this research for some time and have a longitudinal set of data for comparisons. Here are some recent ones: Social Media Continues to Increase in the 2012 Fortune 500 and Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500: A Longitudinal Study (2011). In the 2011 Fortune 500 they found a leveling off of blogging with only 23% hosting a public facing corporate blog.  However, things changed in 2012 as 28% hosted public facing blogs. This surge continues with their latest iteration showing 34% of these large enterprises creating and sharing content through blogs.  Consistent with this is the fact that in 2013, 79% of the Fortune 500 blogs are kept current, take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions.

This was the largest increase since 2008. They concluded that, “signals the return of the online in depth conversation, thought leadership and original content development that was popular a decade ago with early corporate adopters of blogging like IBM and Ford Motors.” I first hand that this is a goal for IBM and supports their strong move into social business (see; My IBM Connect 2013 Session Notes: Complete Listing).

These large firms are twice as active on Twitter as 77% of the Fortune 500 have corporate Twitter accounts with a tweet in the past thirty days. This represents a 4% increase since last year. These 387 corporations with corporate Twitter accounts come from 72 of the 75 industries represented in the Fortune 500. They also found that those companies ranked higher in the 2013 Fortune 500 are more likely to adopt Twitter than their lower ranked counterparts, following the same pattern as blogging.

Facebook presence is also prominent with 70% of the Fortune 500 on Facebook., a 4% increase since last year. Other social media tools are also being used extensively. There are now corporate YouTube accounts were found in 69% of the 2013 F500. This is a 7% increase from last year. Pinterest accounts are found in 9%. Google+ accounts are operating for 35%. Instagram and Foursquare accounts are operated by 9% of the 2013 Fortune 500.

The researches conclude that these results show “an interest in experimenting with new tools.  Only Google+ shows evidence of a significant number of open, but inactive, accounts.  In every other case, there is current activity and vibrant engagement of their audiences.  The use of blogging, after years of low and stagnant adoption has continued its steady move forward with over 1/3 now providing original content and using their blogs to promote causes, establish thought leadership and to better understand their target markets.”

I am very pleased to see an increase in blogging were more in-depth and interactive conversations can occur beyond what the other, more broadcast media allow. Thanks to Nora Barnes and her team for another piece of useful data. 

Top 100 2013 Knowledge Management Influencers on the Twitter Hashtag #KM

MindTouch has a history of researching and producing lists of influencers. They recently shared their internal annual report of Techcomm influencers that they produced using LittleBird. This year, MindTouch also analyzed Knowledge Management influencers. It appears that they used the Twitter hashatg #KM as the basis for their research. While this captures some knowledge management people who use Twitter, specifically those who use the KM hashtag.

Here are the top eight on the list and there are some very good people here. I know all but the top one very well and they all deserve their rating.

1.  weknowmore
2.  David Gurteen
3.  Dave Snowden
4.  Stan Garfield
5.  Nancy White
6.  VMaryAbraham
7.  Jack Vinson
8.  Euan Semple

Here’s the entire list of 100 names to know in #KM. To be fair Aaron Fulkerson acknowledges, “We know there are several profoundly influential people not represented here. However, it should be clear that this list constitutes a core group of influencers in the KM space on Twitter.” I would agree that there are many influential people on the list and also that many are missing.  Those missing must not use the KM hashtag much.

Any list of top KM people that does not include Luis Suarez, Tom Davenport, Larry Prusack, and Clara O'Dell, to name a few, shows the limitations of sticking to one medium. Luis, for one, is very active on social media so he is the one I am most surprised to not see. This is not a criticism of the current list and Aaron does acknowledge the limits of the research. I commend them for making us aware of these 100, some of who I did not know before. 

We just need to be careful how we generalize from these lists. For example, I have ended up on some lists of top influences on things like SharePoint where I was not sure how I got there, even though they were algorithm based.  I am not surprised or concerned to not be on this list as I now write much more about social business and enterprise 2.0 than knowledge management and rarely, if ever, use the KM hashtag, even thoguh I rermain a strong supporter of KM. 

MindTouch plans to make available their list of top 100 influencers in customer support and customer experience. 

Darwin Ecosystem Rolls Out New Awareness Product, TweetZUP

I continue to be connected with Darwineco Systems and have been pleased with their progress. Last Fall they launched a new product under the name Tweather. It received “SAP Big Data Startup of the Year” award at the TechCrunch Disrupt event, held Sept. 10-12, 2012 in San Francisco. This latest achievement goes along with our win of the KM World Trend Setting Product in both 2011 and 2010 and the Most Promising Software award in 2010. Darwin was also named to the 100 companies that matter in 2010 by both KM World and eContent Magazine. The name has been changed to TweetZUP and the capabilities continue to be expanded.

TweetZUP.com is a free Web awareness utility, supported by online advertising, for anyone wanting to know and share in real-time “what’s up with tweets?”  With TweetZUP, users can create, save, set up alerts, and share their own ZUPs (pages) about any topic they care about on Twitter. For researchers, brand promoters, and anyone else who wants to find out what’s going on in any subject, identifying emerging, spiking and trending issues within a ZUP topic is easy, and alerts inform them of movements in the subject matter of interest. ZUP page sponsors can create self-reinforcing communities of users who are already interested in their product category.

Here is a blog post that shows how the tweets around the recent bombing in Boston evolved as the news emerged. It is free and I encourage you to give it a try.

 

How Can a Restaurant Use Social Media?

Paul Beaulieu asks the question, Why is social media still underutilized by restaurants?, on the Smart Blog on Social Media.  He sites some useful stats such as: consumers are 71% more likely to make a purchase based on social media referrals, 1% of U.S. survey respondents say friends’ social media posts have directly influenced a purchase decision, and 15.1 million consumers go to social media channels before making a purchase decision.

Paul does not provide data on the use of social media for restaurants. I do know some that are using Twitter, for example. It is very popular with food trucks as a way to reach a mobile audience. He does offer some ways for restaurants to use video and mobile. 

Here is a successful example for 2005 when the main form of social media was blogs. At the time Ben Williams ran a restaurant, Horsefeathers in North Conway, New Hampshire with his partner Brian Glynn. Ben writes a blog, “Horsefeathers Restaurant: It all about the food folks” to support his place.  The blog is no longer up so I cannot give you a link but it worked well then.

Ben started the blog to provide a more immediate presence than a static web site. He wanted to promote a loyal following and get regular return customers to the restaurant.  A restaurant needs steady customers to sustain itself.  Ben saw the blog as a way to create closer on-going ties to the local people and frequent visitors to the tourist area where they are located.  He was also not a technical person so the ease of use of the blog was appealing.

The effort has been reasonably successful when I spoke with Ben in 2005. The number of unique daily visitors was over a 100 and growing. He also noticed that the number of blog visitors fluctuates with the different highs and lows of the multiple tourist seasons in the mountain area.  It also peaks on Thursday when people are generally planning their weekend. These patterns suggested that visitors appear to be mostly potential restaurant customers and not simply web surfers. 

The success was also measured directly from the great feedback that Ben got from his customers. Ben wanted to use his blog to start conversations that will be continued at his place. Customers responded and talked about content in the blog when they came in to eat or listen to the music. Ben went beyond the traditional restaurant site content of menus and schedules and added regional information to give customers something to talk about and to promote more regional visitors. He wanted people to go to his site to find out what is going on in the area. The region has several seasons, summer hiking, winter skiing, and late fall seasonal shopping at the outlet stores. He focused content consistent with these seasons and wanted to be the trusted resource for area news.

Ben was also interested in getting more women to read his blog so he asked them for suggestions. He also tried to appeal to the many second home owners who want to stay in touch with the area so they will then think of his place when they return. When we spoke Ben was looking for new features and the blog currently includes current views of nearby Mount Washington, current weather in the area, news of the area, their live music schedule with pictures of the performers, cook books “from their prep tables,” and menus.  The posts include pictures and cover a variety of topics that would interest people who like food and like the area.  Their mission statement is to be “the greatest neighborhood eatery in the known universe.”

Now you can go beyond blogs and use other tools, as my favorite neighborhood, Chiba, does with Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, and Google+ recommendations.

 

April Fools: Facebook Fake Friends

Happy April Fool’s Day. Here is a good story for today. Unfortunately, it is real and a sign of the times like the PeerIndex offer to give you rewards for tweeting about products and their whole offering in general which seems easy to scam.  David Lee wrote about how you can buy Facebook “friends” in his story, Fake girlfriend: I paid for make-believe love on Facebook.

David found that for $5 you can hire someone to be your girl friend on Facebook. In fact, there are many people offering this online escort service. For example, one site, Fiverr, has many women - and some men - offering services relating to relationship activity on Facebook for $5. The US-based lists many things people are willing to do for $5.

He selected one and then interviewed her after a bit. David found that “Sophia” has made hundreds of dollars selling her "relationship status." He added that, “twenty-four-year-old Sophia is smart, pretty and has hopes and dreams of getting to grad school.” She also told him that, "the whole Sophia thing is just my marketing username. Nothing on that Facebook profile is real! My photos on there are really me, but nothing else is." Sophia started writing love notes on David’s Facebook page until he confessed that he was a journalist and interviewed her.

This is like all those services that offer you Twitter followers. I get suspicious when some has tens of thousands of followers so no obvious reason. All of these services discredit the value of followers and miss the point. I wrote more about this a while back, see my 2011 post - Our Obsession with Scoring is Now Taking on Individuals on the Web. BTW my Klout score is 56 but I have no idea in what that means nor have I looked at it since I wrote the post in 2011 when it was 55. I tried to find my PeerIndex score but I could not get the site to work. Perhaps it is still mad at me for what I wrote in 2011 when I was a 59. 

State of Social Media Marketing 2012

Social Media continues to grow. The recent McKinsey report, “The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity through Social Technologies,” reports that there are 1.5 billion members of social communities globally and 80% interact regularly with social networks. The found that one in five hours spent online is now spent on social networks, increasingly on mobile devices. McKinsey also projects huge opportunities for wealth creation through social media, many of them are marketing oriented.  However, they also note that companies are just beginning to tap its potential.

Awareness recently released a report, The State Of Social Marketing Report: 7 Major Findings & In-Depth Analysis. To complete this effort they surveyed 469 marketers from wide varieties of industries, company sizes and levels of social marketing expertise. These respondents included a cross-section of executives, managers and those who support the social marketing functions within their organizations.

The seven major findings are as follows:

• Misalignment between business objectives, measurement methodologies and social marketing investment
• Tighter integration between social and rest of marketing and business overall
• Social marketers are starting to measure what matters
• Marketers are yet to tap into the true potential of social
• Social marketing budgets and resources insufficient to drive value
• The big 3 social platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, still dominate
• Limited outsourcing

You might say this represents the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media marketing. The ugly is certainly the first one. As I mentioned in another Awareness report, How to Kick-Start Your Content Marketing - A Seven-Step Approach to Delivering Success, - You need to start with defining your business objectives and build your program and metrics around those goals. If you are not measuring against business goals, the whole effort is meaningless.”

Coming in the bad category are insufficient budgets and the inability to tap into social’s true potential – which I would add is the product of the tow prior findings. The good results include the tighter integration between social media marketing and the rest of the business and the measurement of what matters. Although I am not sure how they know what matters if companies do not create between business objectives, measurement methodologies and social marketing investment.

The top business objectives for social media include: Better customer engagement tops the business objective charts (78%), revenue generation i(51%), better customer experience follows (47%), and increased thought leadership (41%). Unfortunately, only 47% measure success today but 38% more plan to measure by the end of the year. At the same time ROI is listed as the top challenge with 57% indicating this is an issue.

On the plus side, an increased presence across all social media platforms was reported by 66%. Increased frequency of content publishing was reported by 56% and better social marketing integration with other marketing initiatives was reported by 50%. This is all heading in the right direction.

The report goes into good detail on each of the findings with many more quantified results. They conclude that companies are continuing to piece together paid and free tools to measure their impact. This results in a lack of integration that likely affects their ability to measure ROI. They expect an increase in social CRM adoption to tie social metrics with traditional ones to drive business value. I am not sure that social CRM is the only answer but I do see a need to better align social metrics with traditional business ones. I recommend looking at the free report to see more quantified results in a fast growing field where, for some, it is ready fire, aim. 

What Makes a Tweet Popular?

I learned through my Twitter friend @eric_andersen, about an interesting article from the Atlantic, What Fuels the Most Influential Tweets? By Jared Keller. It reported on research by a team of investigators at Indiana University researchers Lillian Weng, Alessando Flammini, Alessando Vespignani, and Filippo Menczer who recently published the paper, Competition Among Memes in a World With Limited Attention. They looked at 120 million retweets connected to 12.5 million users and 1.3 million hashtags to model how information disperses on the social network.

To jump to their conclusion, “The research suggests that it doesn't fully matter who you are or how many connections you have, but what you're saying relative to the existing conversation is what really matters in spreading knowledge online.”  A celebrity with millions of followers cannot gather more RTs a breaking story than many with far fewer followers are mass reporting on.  So the medium is fueled by the message, to twist a phrase by Marshall McLuhan.  So if you want to reach a lot of people write about what they are interested in at the moment. You can add your twist but you need to need to be riding the tide of the day.

 

 

The Weather Gets Social

Checking the weather on the Web is one of my most common uses of the internet.  Now I find it is becoming more social. This is a good thing.  Adweek, noted in, The Weather Channel Launches Redesigned Site, that they are adding new social features.  They have always said that everyone talks about the weather so this makes sense. Cameron Clayton, of the Weather Channel said to Adweek, "If you think about it, one of the only topics of conversation to endure since we all lived in caves is the weather."

Their relaunch gives the viewer a more “personalized local and weather experience with an emphasis on the social nature of weather.” There are now new widgets that allow visitors to share their opinions on the current weather, which is then analyzed to track sentiment along with local and national trends for viewers. Weather.com also now features multiple ways to engage in weather conversation over the various social networks. 

While tweets about the weather may seem common place and boring if the weather is boring. But what if it is not? I recently wrote about research on what makes a tweet be retweeted. These researchers concluded, “The research suggests that it doesn't fully matter who you are or how many connections you have, but what you're saying relative to the existing conversation is what really matters in spreading knowledge online.”  So I concluded, that if you want to reach a lot of people write about what they are interested in at the moment, which could be the weather. The Weather Channel got over 54 million unique visitors in March. I was one of the tem. Adding social capabilities should only up that number. 

 

Awareness Report on Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital

Awareness has released an interesting free report, 3 Keys to Influence: Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital. It began with some useful statistics:

• 90 percent of all purchases are subject to social influence.
• 90 percent of consumers trust recommendations from people they know.
• 67 percent of shoppers spend more money online after seeing recommendations from friends.
• 75 percent of Facebook users have “Liked” a brand, and 53 percent of Twitter users have recommended companies or products.
• Fans of brands are 51 percent more likely to buy.
• Sharing features can increase the spread of awareness by 246 percent with “Likes” and 98 percent with “Send to a friend.”

We are in a social world. When LinkedIn added social features, their use and market value went up. Even the Weather channel is adding social features. It is happening inside and outside the enterprise.  The Awareness report provides three keys to gaining great influence in this new online social world. They define influence as “a brand’s ability to affect or prompt action among its key constituents.”

The first key is growing social capital by leveraging external and internal influence. I like this use of both internal and external. This is why I like the term social business rather than enterprise 2.0. The internal and external social media strategies and practices need to be aligned, and where appropriate, the technology needs to be integrated. I remember the old call center days in 90s when call center reps said they would learn about their company’s latest offers from people calling in. This cannot happen today and should not have happened then.

In the section on leveraging external influence they look at a number of tools, including one of my favorites, Traackr. I have written about them many times (see Appopedia). Here is their enterprise social media list of key influencers. They also mentioned, PeekYou, Kred by PeopleBrowsr, mBlast and PeerIndex. The Awareness report provides an eight step approach to maximizing this influence.  You can also find my posts on Awareness in the Appopedia. 

In the leveraging internal influence section they offer a four step approach that begins with benchmarking your firm’s social capital and concludes with fostering brand advocacy over time.   This is a very useful report for marketers and others who want to expand their organizations’ influence through social media. Here is the way to download it.

 

 

Summary Listing of All My SXSW Notes Music and Interactive

I was pleased to attend SXSW for the first time. Except for the long lines, it exceeded expectations fo both the tech part and the music part. I am grateful for Adobe Acrobat for enabling me to attend. I did go to some of the Adobe sponsored sessions. Here are are my notes on the SXSW Music.

 Here are all my session notes from SXSW Interactive. 

20x2 at SXSW 2012

SXSW Notes: The Complexity Curve: How to Design for Simplicity

SXSW Notes: Design for Social Innovation and Public Good

SXSW Notes: The Curators and the Curated

SXSW Notes: Copy Matters: Content Strategy for the Interface

SXSW Notes: Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface

SXSW Notes: Boost your Mobile Workflow with Adobe’s Newest Product

SXSW Notes: Content As a Means for Social Change

SXSW Notes: No Brochures: Digital Storytelling for Nonprofits

SXSW Notes: Positively Inspired Change Campaigns

SXSW Notes: Coding the Next Chapter of American History

SXSW Notes: The Future of Music Consumption

Here are all my notes from SXSW Music.

SXSW Notes: BAMM.tv Offers a New Way to Serve and Showcase Artists

SXSW Notes: BAMM.tv River Cruise Part One

SXSW Notes: BAMM.tv River Cruise Part Two

SXSW Notes: The Music Scene Part One: March 13

SXSW Notes: The Music Scene Part Two: March 14

 

 

Do You Have A Twitter Addiction? Do You Have A Connection Addiction?

Sameer Patel aka @sameerpatel pointed to an interesting article in the Guardian through Twitter. The title was: Twitter is harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, study finds. Now this is a topic I have covered before – see for example my 2009 post, Is Twitter Like Going Out for a Smoke? More on this older story later in this post but first the Guardian wrote, “Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires. They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other media.” Powerful stuff this Twitter.

The research reported by the Guardian is not the first to tackle this issue. In 2009 I wrote about a Study of Social Media Addiction from Retrevo. It found that their sample used social media in the car (over 35 – 9%, under 35 – 40%), at work (over 35 – 29%, under 35  - 64%), on vacation (over 35 – 41%, under 35 - 65%), on a date (over 35 - 9%, under 35 - 34%), and after sex (over 35 - 8%,  under 35 - 36%). I am sure these numbers are increasing, especially if you include playing scrabble on your smart phone.

Twitter seems to be the most addictive. For respondents under age 35, 27% of those who use Facebook said they check it more than 10 times a day compared to 39% of Twitter users checking in on Twitter more than 10 times a day. Across all age groups, 56% say they check it between one and ten times a day. I certainly find Twitter more addictive than Facebook. The activity is very fast and real time so you want to stay connected and it is easy to make a quick check.

The biggest enablers of this new addiction seem to be smart phones and other mobile devices, especially if you are under 35. In a Gadgetology study only 19% of the 35+ group use a phone as the preferred device for social media services with 81% preferring instead a desktop or laptop computer. This is me as I never use a phone, even though I have an iPhone. Perhaps I will as I get more used to my iPhone. Over on the other side of the generation gap they found 46% of those younger than 35 indicating their preference for a mobile device for all things social media.

Returning to the first post I mentioned, Is Twitter Like Going Out for a Smoke?, I wrote about how smokers often formed informal networks as they had to go to designated spots for their habit. I added the following.

So if implemented right Twitter is more like the smoker’s group without the health risks. With Twitter there is also the timing factor as to whether your paths will cross which also applies to the water cooler. In both cases, the smart networker will know the patterns of his or her prey and look for the right times to engage. Since the smoker group is together for longer periods of time, there are also more likely to be established rules of contact than the newcomer needs to learn to be effective. Smoker’s groups might be more likely to meet at certain times. There are also patterns of high Twitter use to observe. I covered this combination of taking a break and informal networks in two other related posts:

Is Twitter Like Stopping at the Water Cooler? Is this Productive?

Is Twitter like Taking a Nap? But More Productive?

I do find Twitter to be a great way to stay connected and find out what is going on with people I like to stay connected to such as Sameer. In the month of April I will be working from a Greek Island but what made it possible for me to stay “away’ so long was the wifi connection in my temporary home so I will have Twitter, skype, this blog, etc. More on this later. Image from Hellblazer! Flickr creative commons. 

 

Shifts in 2011 Inc. 500 Social Media Usage

I have been writing about the work of Nora Ganim Barnes and her colleagues at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for some time. See my last post on them: Is Social Media Reaching a Plateau in America's Largest Companies? They recently released a new study on the usage of social media in fast-growing corporations. This new study continues the Center’s work on Inc. 500 social media usage for the fifth consecutive year, providing a useful longitudinal study of corporate social media use.

In the first study of 2007, the smaller INC 500 companies outpaced the Fortune 500 in blog use (19% vs. 8%) and this trend continued as both group increased their blogging over the years. Now for the first blogging has declined in the Inc. 500 as other social media tools have emerged. In 2010 50% of the Inc. 500 had a corporate blog, up from 45% in 2009 and 39% in 2008.  Now in 2011, the use of blogging dropped to 37%. In contrast, they found, in a related study that blogs continued at the same 23% level in Fortune 500 companies.

There are other shifts as the use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, texting, downloadable mobile apps and Foursquare are increasing while there are reductions in the use of blogs, message boards, video blogs, podcasts and MySpace. Specifically, in 2011 74% of the Inc. 500 used Facebook and 73% used LinkedIn.  Twenty-five and 24% respectively find that Facebook or LinkedIn is the single most effective social networking platform. In addition, texting, downloadable mobile applications, and Foursquare are used by 13%-15% of the 2011 Inc. 500.

Social media is seen as an effective tool in a variety of ways with 90% of responding executives indicate that social media tools are important for brand awareness and company reputation.  In addition, 88% find social media as important for generating web traffic, 81% find it important for lead generation, and 73% find social media tools important for customer support programs.  At the same time I was surprised to see a drop in monitoring social media as the 2011 study found that 68% of companies do monitor, down from 70% in 2010, which was the highest percent of the past 5 years. Although is a small drop and we will have to see if this trend continues.

Investment in social media will continue to increase for most as 71% plan to increase their investment, 25% said they would keep their social media budget the same, and only 1 company (4%) plans to decrease its investment. Only 24% of the Inc. 500 now have a written social media policy for their employees who use these tools on behalf of the company. This number clearly needs to increase.  Measurement will also likely increase as current metrics include: numbers of fans, followers and supporters (26%), web traffic (25%), lead generation (16%), reduced cost of customer support (10%), the value of sales generated through social media programs (7%). 

Most firms are filling resource requirements internally as 66% report retraining or repositioning existing employees to handle their social media efforts, 10% use external consultants or agencies, and 7% have made new hires specifically for their social media needs.  In summary, 91% of the Inc. 500 are now using social media to market their brands with a shift from blogs as the main tool to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. This matches my intuitive and informal observation but it is really useful to have this useful research to validate these trends.

 

Progressive Mainstream Media Moving to News Aggregation

Perhaps no industry has been hit harder by the growth of user generated content and news aggregators of all stripes than the mainstream print newspapers. I have discussed this bit (for example, see Who killed the Rocky Mountain News? from John Temple). Many progressive newspapers and television outlets have decided to join social media rather than fight it (see for example, Enhancing TV Viewing with Social Media and Interactivity and BBC Pushes Social Media for Its News Staff for Both News Collection and Impact Monitoring,).

Going Beyond Content Creation to Becoming a News Aggregator

Matthew Ingram recently expanded on ways traditional media can survive and thrive in a Web 2.0 world in his Gigaom piece, Don’t think of it as a newspaper — it’s a data platform. One of his suggestions is it to open up a relationship with outside developers. For example, USA Today APIs include one for all of its news articles, one for reviews of books, movies and other entertainment, and one for its census data. The latter is made up of public data that has been collected by USA Today and put into in a more usable format than the original government version.

Matthew writes that the UK paper, the Guardian, has been inviting outside developers to make use of its APIs through a series of “hack days,” and they have come up with some interesting ideas. As Matthew writes, “one of the driving forces behind the Guardian open platform was the idea that the paper itself couldn’t possibly think of or develop every interesting or worthwhile project involving its content — so why not “crowdsource” that effort via the API?” Good idea.

Becoming a News Aggregator Through Citizen Journalism

Another way to crowdsource the news is through citizen journalism. We have seen this informally through the use of Twitter and Facebook in many of the recent revolutionary movements in the Middle East. A number of newspapers and television stations are doing this more formally by adding citizen journalism to their web sites to become news aggregators, as well as distributors of their content (see our five part series on what PBS affiliate, KETC, did to create a great community through social media. Here is also some advice on how to proceed with this type of news aggregation (Creating a Sustainable Ecosystem for Community News Media - Part One: Providing Relevance and Creating Loyalty). 

 

Is Social Media Reaching a Plateau in America's Largest Companies?

Nora Ganim Barnes and Justina Andonian at the Center for Marketing Research, Charlton College of Business, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth recently released a report on The 2011 Fortune 500 and Social Media Adoption: Have America's Largest Companies Reached a Social Media Plateau? This is another in the great series of studies on social media use in business and elsewhere (see for example, Social Media Use Continues to Expand in US Higher Education).

This study continues their annual research started in 2008 they released one of the first studies of the Fortune 500 (F500) adoption. The study has been expanded to include the usage of the fastest growing social media tools – Facebook and Twitter.  They look at public facing instances of social media. They found that 114 (23%) of the primary corporations listed on the 2011 F500 have a public-facing corporate blog with a post in the past 12 months. This is the same as 2010 and only one more than 2009.

These results include two of the top five corporations (Wal-Mart and Exxon). Three companies in the top 5 in 2011 without a public-facing blog are: Chevron, Conoco Philips, and Fannie Mae. However, I know that Conoco Philips has a very active enterprise social media presence. In 2011, 91% of the F500 blogs take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions and this is an increase of 1% since 2009 and 2010.

Twitter usage is much greater with 308 (62%) of the 2011 F500 maintianing corporate Twitter accounts with a tweet in the past thirty days. This represents a 2% increase since last year. Of these companies, the top 10 corporations (Wal-Mart, Exxon, Chevron, Conoco Philips, Fannie Mae, General Electric, Berkshire Hathaway, General Motors, Bank of America Corp. and Ford Motors) consistently post on their Twitter accounts.  Note that this includes companies without blogs.

This is the first year the number of followers was included in this study. Google has the highest number of followers on Twitter among the 2011 F500 followed by Whole Foods Market, Starbucks, and Southwest Airlines. The Washington Post has quickly grown to almost 600,000 in just over a year.

Facebook presence is almost as high as Twitter and far greater than blogs with 289 (58%) of the 2011 F500 now on Facebook. Only 156 companies (31%) have neither a Twitter account nor a Facebook presence. A different set of companies lead in Facebook followers than Twitter followers. Coca-Cola dominates with 32,303,342 fans and this is the highest recorded number of the 2011 F500's 289 companies with a Facebook account. Starbucks pulls into 2^nd place with 24,102,790 fans. Target and Nike both have more than 4.5 million fans.  This makes sense as these are more mass-market companies who would tend to use Facebook for marketing purposes,

The researchers conclude that social media use by large companies may have leveled off and this could be the case. It does seem that the more marketing focused tools, Twitter and Facebook, are leading the use of blogs that tend to work better for thought leadership and more complex messages. I really appreciate the work of Nora Barnes and her colleagues. They are proving a great service. Check out their full report for more details. 

 

Social Media Club of Boston 5th Anniversary Celebration: The Evolution of Social Business

Last night I attended the Social Media Club of Boston 5^th Anniversary Celebration: The Evolution of Social Business. It featured a panel with Alistar Rennie, General Manager, Social Business and Collaboration Solutions, IBM; Andy Carusone from Lowe’s Home Improvement; and Ric Fulop, North Bridge Venture Partners.

Alistar talked about how IBM got involved with social media. In 2004 they were working to become more integrated on a global basis.  They built some collaborative tools for their own use that become products for clients.  But it much more that tools. They used social tools to help define their values to better establish trust.

At the same time they found that their clients were experiencing the same issues.  Over the past several years the conversations have gone from tools to how to better organize the business. The discussion now is how to leverage the network of people. He mentioned CEMEX that wanted to integrate their people on a global basis. CEMEX wanted to reduce product introduction time by 50%. In a former life, I did some work for them in Mexico. They sell concrete and make a lot of money doing it through better use of technology. He said we will see a change in how organizations are structured. Command and control will be gone. The issue is now how to drive faster decision-making and innovation

Andy focused inside the firewall. He discussed what Lowe’s is doing for employee connections. Two years ago he got put into the social media effort. The history of Lowe’s is making home improvement simpler. This goal has guided all their efforts. Home improvement changed in the 80s to the big box store from small stores. Now people do not want to just experience home improvement at a store. They want to experience it at their homes on the Web. To make the home improvement experience simple when it is actually complex, Lowe’s needed to connect their enterprise.

The conversations on social media are now not about tools but performance. They needed to inspire their workforce to move their work out loud. They needed to create light-weight workflows. With social media, solutions are going viral. Instead of asking their supervisor, employees are asking the enterprise through social media.

Ric Fulop said he has been starting companies since he was 16. Now he is an investor after doing nine startups. His firm has funded over 100 companies. They are now focused on very early stage companies. They funded Acquia and helped it get started (see Acquia Provides Drupal Commons to Support Open Source Enterprise Collaboration).

He talked about three trends after looking at over 1,000 business plans every year: consumerization of the enterprise, conversational Web, and next generation optimization. Consumerization of the enterprise will mean information about companies will become more local and granular with more user-generated content.  The conversational Web means that if you put up information, there are many comments. Now there is much more attention to the comments. Next generation optimization means that you can bypass IT to upgrade or change things.

The questions started:

Lowe’s uses IBM Connections inside the firewall for their over 250,000 employees. They have over 6,000 communities.  Their CEO is the fourth largest blogger in the community. This is part of his strategy to better connect with employees.  Now you can go beyond awareness to commitment because of the better engagement. Andy said that social media did not change their culture. It exposed it and this is what they needed. They needed to move away from control.  Hearing the complaints is even more helpful that the complements because then you can address them.  Some companies are not ready for this. The CEO recognizes this.

I asked Ric about startups that are looking at the Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Employee – monitoring what people are saying within the enterprise. Ric mentioned firms like Get Satisfaction for customer feedback, Shopify for social commerce, Otimizly, and other tools.  These were all Web focused tools.

Andy mentioned that they are listening to the voice of the employee. Their stores are quite different by location. In the past messages were delivered by top down. Now you needed to have networked conversations about initiative. They need dialogue, not feedback. Feedback is not interactive.  The do not use monitoring tools but they have tens of thousands of employees o monitoring what is being said and responding to it.

Someone asked about who is commenting on the Web. He does not do it. Ric said Google now indexes comments. There is very valuable information there. The tool, Discuss, said they have close to 50 million comments within 500 million readers. In Engadget some articles have over 5,000 comments to a short article.  Contenly helps companies generate content that generate comments. The commenters are the people who care about the product.

A question: How do you accommodate different cultures in social media?  Alistair said they are seeing more common behavior rather than differences and they have been studying this a lot. One issue to work through is getting language translation in place so people can speak in their natural language. They wil be more engaged this way. Ric mentioned Hyperlocal and Local Response that deal with these issues for companies. Local Response can tell you what everyone in Twitter said about your company.

To a question about IT, Andy said the Lowe’s IT group is one of the most progressive uses of social media. Alistair said some of the best companies are looking at how to take the information gained through social media and making actual changes.

Andy said the social media behind the firewall is not an application that people should be required to use such as a payroll system. You need an culture of opt in. He added that you cannot measure value of social media by counting stuff. ROI is not the issue. Make sure you are measuring the right thing. It is change in performance. Measure outcomes. They needed a difference type of performance at Lowe’s and social media enabled it. Companies who are successful will not look at social media as an IT project, but a business project. You will not get 100% engagement but they do have 90% participation at Lowe’s.

This was an entertaining and useful session. 

 

Why I Post My Favorite Tweets: Simple Content Curation and Archiving

Sometimes I am asked by colleagues, readers of this blog, or tweeters why I post my favorite tweets (see for example: My Favorite Tweets for September 16 - 30 2011). Others suggest that I should use this or that tool to make the task of archiving tweets easier. While I am sure that there may be other tools for this job, that would require me to use yet another tool. I try to keep my tool set concise. I remember that my former colleague Tom Davenport said that his research showed that the most productive knowledge workers were those who used fewer tools to more things. I find that is my personal preference.

It takes a lot for me to use a new tool. Recently, I found a great new social collaboration tool, Convofy, that I will be writing about soon. I was slow to begin using Twitter. TweetDeck and my FastFoward colleagues showed me the possibilities.  Now I use it for several things. It is one of the tools I use to monitor what is going on in my areas of interests. Other tools include several news feeds and the Darwin Social Media on the Web Edition. When I find something through TweetDeck I retweet it. When I find something through another source I tweet it. So Twitter is now my main social bookmarking tool.  When I am looking for new content to blog about, the first place I look is my own tweet stream (@billives) or the @darwineco tweet stream.

Now Twitter and TeeetDeck do not seem to be good archiving tools so I use my blog for this as it is a good archiving tool. While there might be a better tool for this archiving, I am happy so far with simply extending my existing tool set. I also find the process of going back through my tweets of the last two weeks and selecting favorites to be a useful exercise as it reminds me of the headlines of the last two weeks. While there is a bit of manual work here, it is something I can easily do instead of watching the TV commercials during sports events. Now I have a record of many of the things I felt were important during the past few years. 

 

The New Twitter Guide for Newsrooms

I have been discussing the relationship of Twitter and journalism a bit (see The New Twitter Journalism, as well as related: Is Twitter Speech, Text, or Something New?). Many others have touched on the topic and now Twitter, itself, is stepping in with its “Twitter for Newsrooms,” using the hastag #TfN. It writes that it offers resources to help with all stages of the reporting and publishing process.

There are four main sections: #Report, #Enagage, #Publish, and #Extra that includes their blogs. The Research section includes a strategy for search and suggestions for finding sources. We would recommend our partner Twortex for search as it uses some of the Darwin Awareness Engine™ technology to look at what is happening within Twitter. The Engage section includes tips on effective tweeting with examples from journalists

The guide has gotten mixed reviews from TechCrunch and Mashable. Mashable notes that Twitter may be preaching to the choir. They note that” it’s pretty likely that you’re well versed in Twitter if you’re on Twitter and reading something called Twitter for Newsrooms.” TechCrunch adds that the guide is, “a little bit obvious for anyone who uses Twitter on a daily basis. There’s no new info here, just tips on how to report, engage with other users and followers and how to use tweets in the process of reporting. But the fact that Twitter has launched an official guide for journalists is indicative of the impact of social media on the news.”

I think the last point is significant and I am sure that I will likely learn a few things. Here is what a few others wrote before the guide came out. Mathew Ingram posed an interesting piece, No, Twitter Is Not a Replacement For Journalism. He points out the concept of “news as a process,” He writes, “that instead of something that is produced by media outlets as a kind of finished product, an artefact of an industrial-style approach to the news, journalism now is an ongoing and somewhat messy process.” There are stories or rumors that then get refined over time. This refinement is where Twitter can play a key role.

Mark Colvin of ABC, in his post, Journalism's new wave: the world in a tweet, summarize two Twitter journalism tips. First, “If you're going to cultivate sources on Twitter, make sure you stay in touch with them, even when nothing's happening. Show them you care about them as people, that they're not just a story - develop a relationship, just like journalists have always done.” This makes a lot of sense.

Second, “Read many different news sources. If you're not really across the news, Twitter feeds will just look like random chatter, and you won't be able to judge what stories are the most important to focus on.” This is where the Darwin Awareness Engine™ can help as it did with PBS.

On a deeper level, the Neiman Labs blog post, Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why we need a new paradigm for our social media platforms, concludes that “our text-ordered world is resolving back into something more traditionally oral — more conversational and, yes, more ephemeral. ‘Chaos is our lot,’ Clay Shirky notes; ‘the best we can do is identify the various forces at work shaping various possible futures.’ One of those forces — and, indeed, one of those futures — is the hybrid linguistic form that we are shaping online even as it shapes us… A paradigm we might call “Twitter." It is this more conversational nature that allows for the refinement of news that Matthew discusses. We would only add that the concept of awareness is a natural complement to this view of the medium of Twitter to see how the refinement is progressing.

 

 

Our Obsession with Scoring is Now Taking on Individuals on the Web

I had not been paying too much attention to Klout until I saw this article in the New York Times, Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored. I skimmed it and tweeted about it to save the link for further reading. I often use my Twitter feed, @billlives, as a social bookmarking tool so I remember and have access to posts and articles I want to save. I then go through my tweets twice a month and it gives me an overview of what I thought was important during this time. Then I do a blog post that lists the tweets I found really important as a way archive these tweets. I am sure there are more efficient ways to archive Twitter but I find this practice a useful exercise. I also use the @darwineco Twitter feed for the same reason when the topic is more relavent to Darwin Ecosystems with the added goal of sharing it with my teammates at Darwin.  Then I follow the same steps ending up with a post on the Darwin blog.

Well, the tweet on Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored got retweeted six times within a few hours so this action caused me to look more closely at the article. I then tweeted that I was inspired by the RTs to write a blog post on the article and I got two replies for the six who said they were looking forward to the post. I was pleased as this type of exchange is how Twitter is supposed to work. I also met a few new Twitter friends in the process.

The article itself exposed me more to the growing movement behind such tools as Klout and Peerindex. It is about all of us getting a number, similar to Robert Parker’s quantification of wine. While there is more objectivity here that with Parker, the underlying motive is the same, the quantification of the world. This is a topic I have covered several times.  I did a four part series on this blog that began with Rising Above the Over Quantification of Content: Part One: Parker vs. Piaget.

In this post I quoted, Adam Gopnik in the September 6, 2004 issue of the New Yorker, “(Parker) was uncannily successful because (he was an) apostle of a radical American empiricism – an insistence that facts and numbers could show you what was really going on, against everything tradition told you…The debate is not about whether the numbers are right but whether it is right to have numbers.”

In a similar perspective, Nick Carr quotes Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in his Atlantic article,Is Google Making Us Stupid?, that it is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Carr adds that what Fred Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. I would add: and what Robert Parker did for wine.  Nick goes on to write, “in Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.”

Personally, I think a little ambiguity and complexity is good. So how does this relate to someone’s reputation on the Web? Personally, I follow people for many different reasons so a single score is not going to help too much. I also follow people related to three different twitter accounts I am connected with (@billives, @darwineco, and @outstart). The fact that Klout does offer the top ten topics a person is known for helps but there is still a gap between the complexity of why I follow people and a score, in the same way I might like a wine for many different reasons, occasions, and food parings.

The New York Times article quotes, Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst I respect with Altimeter Group. “Using a single metric to evaluate influence is dangerous. He noted that Klout “lacks sentiment analysis” — The Times adds, “so a user who generates a lot of digital chatter might receive a high score even though what’s being said about the user is negative. Also, a single metric can be misleading: someone with little Twitter experience can snag a high score if they happen to post a video that goes viral.”

I look at the Klout scores of people I know and there is a rough correlation with my views of what works for me but certainly not a precise one. Like wine, I think this is an area best left to the full range of human cognitive abilities and the multiple associations the human mind can make.  The Klout score of someone I do not known might help except for the fact that I know it is highly likely not completely accurate for my needs, only a clue about what to pursue in more depth. This also does not consider the opportunity to game this score, just as people do with Google. For the record, I did check my scores on two of these tools and my Klout score is 55 and my Peerindex score is 59 but I am not really sure what this means and I do not know how to game it. 

At Darwin, we take the opposite view of Google and Klout. We view the Web as too massive to understand and human reasoning too complex and individualized to fully progam. Rather that drawing inspiration for Fred Taylor’s time and motion studies and attempting to understand and control the universe of content on the Web, Darwin is inspired by Edward Norton Lorenz’s work on Chaos Theory in mathematics and weather prediction. Darwin does not try to impose an order on content, it lets content self-organize. During the 1950s, Lorenz became skeptical of the appropriateness of the linear statistical models in meteorology, as most atmospheric phenomena involved in weather forecasting are non-linear. Instead he proposed the concept of attractors that operate within a dynamic system that evolves over time in a complex, non-repeating pattern.  This is the complete opposite of Fred Taylor’s repeatable time and motion approach.

Now I am not saying the Darwin approach is better than the Google or Klout approach, just different. We actually think the two approaches complement each other. We call our tool an awareness engine™ to distinguish it from a search engine. The Darwin approach does not require human intervention to be organize the content; it is self-organizing based on the content itself and therefore more representative of what is happening as it occurs, and respectful of each unique context. It also eliminates the possibilities of search optimization and spam. It visualizes the content in a way that allows you to sort through the complexity a but better and make your own decisions on what is most important and relevant to you. 

 

 

 

Review of Business Goes Virtual

I recently received a review copy of Business Goes Virtual: Realizing the Value of Collaboration, Social and Virtual Strategies by John P. Girard, Cindy Gordon, and JoAnn L. Girard.  I have known Cindy for some time and we have done work together on several occasions, including several writing efforts so I had high expectations for this work. The book argues that after some false starts, four critical enablers have converged to make virtual business opportunities a reality: social technology, visionary leadership, an increasing recognition of the value of a collaboration culture, plus virtual worlds. They define virtual business as follows: “A virtual business provides innovative solutions to new and traditional business challenges by exploiting social technology, leadership, and collaboration in both the real and virtual words.”

The book examines four virtual business strategies that are showing promise. The “any place, any time” strategy provides high quality service 24/7 through bypassing traditional geographic challenges. The “people know best” strategy looks at crowd-sourcing the wisdom of every-day people. The “everyone has a stake” strategy allows organizations to take advantage of their stakeholders’ views. Finally, the “real in the virtual world” strategy enables real businesses to sell their wares in the virtual world.

The book provides case examples and best practices. They look at both successes and failures in this new market and make some bets on the future. They conclude that virtual business is here to stay and firms need to develop a strategy to take advantage of this new market or risk their demise.

One strong example is the transformation from printed books to e-books. I am reading a virtual version of their book now. The authors report that on Christmas Day 2009, consumers purchased more Kindle books than physical books through Amazon, a virtual store itself. Now the iPad is booming with Apple selling more tablets than PCs both in terms of volume and revenue – and the iPad is much cheaper. It takes e-reading to new heights and provides connectivity to so many other possibilities. For example, it becomes that much easier to sharing insights from what you are reading or look up related information from other sources.  Publishers who recognize this trend will be in position to ride the new wave and those that do not will be ridden over.

This new world will change many things including jobs. The authors note that many of the top jobs of 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are now faced with preparing our children for jobs that do yet exist and to solve problems that are yet unknown.  This uncertainty has always been the case to some extent but it has become a much stronger factor.  I saw from another source that in 1986 75% of the knowledge that a worker needed was stored in workers’ heads but by 2006, that number was estimated to be 9%. We need new ways of providing the remaining 81% and the virtual world opens up an opportunity for this also through social software.  

It is nice that at least some of the challenges brought forward with the virtual world can also be addressed through it and the new technologies that have enabled it. The authors provide a useful chapter on these new technologies including social networks, blogs, microblogs, and wikis. I was interested to see that Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2010 Report on American bloggers found that 81% have been blogging more than 2 years and 11% say blogging is their primary income source. I am currently one of those in the latter group.  Supporting their growth predictions is that fact that most of their usage stats for most tools have now been surpassed.

Of course it is more than technology and they cover the leadership necessary to go forward in the virtual world.  They found a variety of leadership styles to work including both transformational and transactional. They provide a series of stories written by a diverse group of successful virtual business leaders.

The book covers much more including the power of sharing, the four strategies mentioned above, and where the future may take us. I recommend it to anyone who wants to make sense of today’s business world and the opportunities and risks it provides. 

 

Twitter Use Keeps Expanding

A new Pew Report stated that 13% of online adults use Twitter, and half of Twitter users access the service on a cell phone. This is a significant increase from the 8% of online adults who said they were Twitter users the first time Pew asked about Twitter adoption in November 2010. Different groups a have varying adoption rates. The study found that 25% of online African Americans now use Twitter, 19% of Hispanics, compared with 9% of non-Hispanic whites to use the Pew terms.

There are age differences as well. As reported, the number of 30-49 year olds who use the service has doubled since late 2010—from 7% of such users in November to 14% in May 2011. This growth trend is more pronounced among 25-34 year olds—Twitter use for this group roughly doubled between November 2010 and May 2011, from 9% to 19%. At the same time among the youngest adults (those ages 18-24) Twitter usage as stable at 16 – 18 %. Twitter use in the 55 -64 age group also doubled from 4% to 8% during this same time period.  Even the over 65 age group went from 4% to 6%.

The new data is recent as the results are based on telephone interviews conducted by the Princeton Survey Research Associates International from April 26 to May 22, 2011, among a sample of 2,277 adults, age 18 and older. They had about a 12% response rate.

If you want to monitor what is being discussed on Twitter, our business partner Twortex uses the Darwin Ecosystem technology to look at conversations on Twitter. It is free. 

 

 

Corporate Social Media Policies are Advancing

Pam Sahota has provided a useful post, Examples of Corporate Social Media Policies, that actually contained links to 14 examples. While it is always good to look at what others are doing, Pam started with the proper caution that there’s no right policy. Your company needs to find what is right for your culture and needs. Here are a few.

Best Buy has received a lot of press using Twitter for customer service. It has a social media policy in place in order to avoid issues regarding privacy and other topics. Their policy begins with the statement: “If you are an hourly (non-exempt) employee, you may participate in Twelpforce, with your manager’s approval, during your regular work hours. This includes time spent reading the Twelpforce Twitter feed and composing messages sent using the ‘#twelpforce’ hashtag, and all other work related to Twelpforce.” Anything done outside work hours does not count.

Content is broadly defined as “as anything you have placed on your website, blog, microblog, or video sharing account.” By doing this you grant Best Buy “an irrevocable and unrestricted worldwide license to use, modify, reproduce, transmit, display, and distribute the Content (defined below) on Your Site for any purpose whatsoever to the extent permitted by law.” So they can modify as they want which is interesting. You are expected to follow the social media policy that is extensive and has the tagline: “Be smart. Be respectful. Be human.” Those are all good ideas.

You are expected to disclose your affiliation and, at the same time, state this your writing is your opinion. There is a lot more in Best Buy policies and they seem both useful and appropriate.

Pam finds Ford’s policy to be subtle, “human”, and sensible. They feel that that social media follows the same rules (as other communication channels), just in a new playground. You need to use your common sense, beware of privacy issues, play nice and be honest. They seem similar to Best Buy from a quick look. You need to be respectful and aware that what you say is permanent.

General Motors policy states that it likes Charlene Li’s blogger code of ethics and have adapted it for gmblogs.com. They ask bloggers to tell the truth and acknowledge and correct any mistakes promptly. They will not delete comments unless they are spam, off-topic, or defamatory and reply to comments when appropriate as promptly as possible. They will link to online references and original source materials directly. They will disagree with other opinions respectfully. I like the ongoing reference to respect in these policies.

Blog and social media policies have come a long way since I wrote these posts in 2005, Blog-Linked Firings Prompt Calls for Better Policies and What’s On and Off the Record for Bloggers?  This is a good thing. 

 

The New Twitter Journalism and the Darwin Awareness Engine™

Social media has transformed journalism for both good and bad. I awhile back I wrote: Tech Reporters Becoming More News Monitors and Managers. I noted that social media, and especially Twitter is spreading good and bad information equally quickly, and in volume. It is often the first story out that wins t and this condition is called term Churnalism. In my next post, Content Curation in Action, I mentioned an Economist article, Meet the Curators, that notes that "aggregation" or "curation" of other people's coverage is becoming recognized more and more as one of the indispensable elements of journalism. They add that, “Being able to scan a vast range of material, determine what's reliable, relevant and sufficiently objective, decide what will actually interest your particular readers and arrange it in a way that they can use are not trivial skills.”

Now here are some practical suggestions for using Twitter in a responsible way as a journalist in the post, Journalism's new wave: the world in a tweet by Mark Colvin of ABC. This is relevant not just to the traditional professional journalist but to all us bloggers who report about what is happening in our niche of the world.  Mark begins with a long and interesting history of his work in journalism and the evolving technologies form typewriters to Twitter. It also spanned my professional years and the information technologies I used so his experiences were meaningful.

Then Mark gets down to some practical suggestions building off the work of researcher Jess Hill. Jessie uses twitter to follow a lot of people who post about areas of the world we're currently interested in. They “monitor patterns and cross-reference what they see, so that they'll get early warning of breaking stories and then try to verify what they're seeing.” But they do not just accept the tweets at face value. When people appear to be eyewitnesses on the ground, they DM them to get phone numbers and Skype addresses. As Mark notes this approach “relies on old and proven journalistic techniques, like source-checking and cultivating contacts.”

Mark also mentioned the Twitter work of Andy Carvin at NPR who monitors and challenges news stories coming out of the Middle East. I knew Andy when he was in Boston before his NPR days and have great respect for his efforts.

Mark goes onto summarize two Twitter journalism tips. Forst, “If you're going to cultivate sources on Twitter, make sure you stay in touch with them, even when nothing's happening. Show them you care about them as people, that they're not just a story - develop a relationship, just like journalists have always done.” This makes a lot of sense.

Second, “Read many different news sources. If you're not really across the news, Twitter feeds will just look like random chatter, and you won't be able to judge what stories are the most important to focus on.” This is where the Darwin Awareness Engine™ can help as it did with PBS.

As Rob Paterson, working with PBS, said, “What Darwin enables you to do is to see a pattern. To see a pattern you must be ready to see it so you must have a hypothesis on any topic that is complex. Darwin enables me to set up the feeds to reach deeply into the various components of my hypothesis… Then, as step three, Darwin presents me with layers of results every day based on these feeds.”

Darwin does the content aggregation and shows the themes so you do not have to spend energy looking through multiple sources, but rather focus on the emerging patterns from these sources.  It can complement Twitter and other social media sources to help focus the journalist’s efforts. I use it this way to help cover the enterprise 2.0 space for this blog through the Darwin Edition on enterprise social media. 

 

Are You a Happy Tweeter or a Gloomy One?

There was an interesting article in the New Scientist, Happier people tweet together. Psychologist Johan Bollen of the University of Indiana and colleagues tracked 102,000 Twitter users over six months, analyzing the 140-character-or-less text from 129 million of their tweets with standard techniques from psychology. In other words. “they measured the emotional content of the tweets as reflected in the presence of positive or negative words from a lexicon previously established by psychologists. From this they could assess the "subjective well-being" of the users through their tweets.”

They found that happier people - those recording a high subjective well being - tended to be tweet with people who were also happier. The same was true for those who were gloomy. "It turns out that Twitter users are preferentially linked to those with whom they share a similar level of general happiness," says Bollen.

Of course there could be many explanations for these results. The researchers suggested happy or unhappy people may seek out similar people as reflected in their tweets. Another possibility as Bollen suggests, “it could be that the emotions expressed even in short tweets have an infectious quality, lifting peoples' spirits or filling them with gloom, depending on what they read.”

There have been a number of studies that indicate that people with similar states of “subjective well-being” tend to be involved in social networks in the physical world. This study suggests that that behavior may carry over to the virtual world.

In addition, sentiment analysis of text is a subjective and not yet precise art. This is true whether the analysis is done by humans or by computers. It was unclear from the article but looking at 129 million tweets must have involved some machine support. Perhaps the machines only literally looked at what they were directed at and did not make “decisions” on the sentiment.  

Perhaps I will start looking at my fellow tweeters. Since I tend to tweet more about ideas that feelings and those I interact with most on Twitter do the same, there may not be real indication. I know I use terms like good read to praise a blog post but not sure if this truly a reflection of my “subjective well-being.” For the record I do tend to think of myself as a happy person with a positive outlook. I am also attracted to people with a similar orientation. 

What do you think? 

 

US Charities Outpace Other Sectors in Social Media

Here is more great work by Nora Ganim Barnes at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research. This study is on the usage of social media by US charities. The new study compares organizational adoption of social media in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 by the 200 largest charities in the United States based on a list compiled annually by Forbes Magazine.

To gather this data, the Center for Marketing Research conducted nationwide telephone surveys of the nonprofits on the Forbes list. Their findings are based on detailed interviews with executives of the 78 charities that responded. Those that participated had a wide range in mission, average gifts, and total revenue. They include the Salvation Army, Easter Seals, Habitat for Humanity, Shriners Hospital for Children and the American Heart Association.

In 2007, the first study on the use of social media by large charities showed that these large non-profits were leading large and small businesses as well as universities in their familiarity with, usage of, monitoring of, and attitude towards social media. One year later, in 2008, the second study showed that the lead in knowledge, adoption and positive attitude was still intact.

By 2009 the research found that 97 percent of charitable organizations were using some form of social media. Now the latest iteration of their research finds that all of the top charities in the US are using at least one form of social media, either blogs, podcasts, message boards, social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare), texting or video blogging. Usage of LinkedIn has jumped from 36% to 58% in one year, while the use of MySpace as a platform has declined from 30% to 22%.  Both Foursquare and texting were new in the 2010 study and made respectable showings at 28% and 44% respectively.

At present sixty-four percent of the organizations are blogging, showing no significant change from last year. Facebook (97%), Twitter (96%), and YouTube (92%) are now the most common tools used Ninety percent of those studied in 2010 report social media is very important to increasing awareness of their mission. The researchers concluded that while these organizations are best known for their non-profit status and their fundraising campaigns, they demonstrate an acute awareness of the importance of Web 2.0 strategies in meeting their objectives. 

This is great work by the non-profits. Now business has to catch up. 

 

TV Industry Taps Social Media for Oscars and other Events

Continuing its coverage of social media and TV, Brian Stelter reported in the New York Times on how TV Industry Taps Social Media, in this case for the Oscars.  Recognizing that people multiple task with their computer while watching TV as I wrote about yesterday, ABC created a companion Web site with behind-the-scenes video streams. Oscar winners will be seen accepting an award on the TV set, then seen celebrating backstage on the Web.

The article quoted Ian Schafer, the chief executive of the digital agency Deep Focus, who said that Twitter and Facebook messages about shows may well be “the most efficient way to drive tune-in.”  I have found this for blogs and it makes sense for TV. To me Twitter is a great traffic driver, more than a direct message deliverer.  Far from competing than TV, the Twitter “water-cooler effect” makes big shows even bigger. The Grammy Awards had its highest rating in a decade this year with a lot of online support.  Again, the same holds for blogs and Twitter, in my view.

The article also quoted Dick Costolo, the chief executive of Twitter, that online conversations about TV shows turn the programs into events, “meaning people watch them as they happen,” blunting the impact of digital video recording. This makes sense, also the Times noted that digital recording remains strong.

The Times reported more data to support this trend. During the Super Bowl this year, Twitter users set a new record by sending 4,064 messages each second, the highest number of messages per second recorded during any sporting event.. In addition, a recent study by Deloitte of American consumers ages 14 to 75 found that 42 percent sometimes surfed the Web while watching TV. I do all the time, especially during onscreen commercials. The eye balls for ads may be drifting online. 

 

The Inc. 500 Continues to Embrace Social Media in Increasing Numbers

Here is the latest in the very useful series of longitudinal studies on social media use by The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth led by Nora Barnes.  This one covered Social Media Usage in the Inc. 500. In contrast here is their most recent one on Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500.  In this case, there was a nationwide telephone survey of those companies named by Inc. Magazine to the Inc. 500 list. All interviews took place in October and November of 2010 and obtained 34% participation. 

Of course, this sample represents a moving target as the companies included continue to shift and this may effect the data.  In 2010 there were more government services and financial services firms than the years before. Since companies in these two areas under use social media compared to others, this shift has the effect on reducing growth numbers.

We can see this effect of shifting market niches in the numbers reported in the study. In 2010 83% of the Inc. 500 reporting using at least one of the social media tools studied (see below).  However, government services companies make up 12% of the 2010 Inc. 500, but 27% of those not using social media tools. Energy companies comprise 3% of the 2010 Inc. 500 but 17% of the non-users.  Financial services companies make up 5% of the Inc. 500, but they comprise 10% of the companies who have not yet adopted social media.

The study appears to be focused on market facing uses of social media but then this is the Center for Marketing Research.  It looked at blogs, online video, message boards, podcasting, and the specific social networking tools:  Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Linkedin, and Foursquare.  Two of the biggest gainers in 2010 are Twitter and Facebook. Twitter is used by 59% of the Inc. 500 use it for business purposes, up from 52%.  Twitter is perceived as a useful tool as 81% of users consider it a success. Facebook growth was higher with 71% using it for business up from 61% in 2009 and it had a 85% success rating.

Next in percent of usage were blogs. Looking back over the past three years there was a steady increase in company blogs with a rise from 38% in 2008 to 45% in 2009 to 50% in 2010.  In addition to the growth in usage the report noted that firms are using them more effectively, “There is a strong propensity to engage consumers through accepting and replying to comments and providing a vehicle for subscriptions.”  Company blogging was also considered successful by 86% of adopters. In addition, 34% percent have developed policies to govern blogging by their employees. In the Fortune 500 only 20% report such policies.  Both numbers are too low.  The Fortune 500 also are less likely to use blogs with only 23% reporting have a company blog in 2010, a one percent increase over 2009.

Within the Inc. 500 the majority (56%) feel social media is important for their success online.  They also look at what others are saying about them through social media. Seventy percent report they actively monitor, up slightly from 68% last year, 60% in 2008 and 50% in 2007.  In addition to using social media to communicate to their markets, there is a rise in use for communication with partners, vendors, and suppliers. Blog use in this category rose form 18% in 2009 to 22% in 2010.  Facebook is used by 31% of respondents and Twitter is used by 27%.

I have only addressed some of the highlights. The complete executive summary is available at the Center for Marketing Research site. 

 

Blogging and Twitter by the Fortune 500: A Longitudinal Study

Here is some new research, The Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging and Twitter Usage by America’s Largest Companies, by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.  I have covered some of their earlier work (see Fortune 500 Blogging Study), This new study builds on their 2008 study and expands to look at the Fortune 500's usage of Twitter.

The main findings indicated that 180 (22%) of the 2009 Fortune 500 have a public-facing corporate blog with a post in the past 12 months. This is up from 81 companies (16%) in 2008. To no surprise IT companies have the most blogs. This includes Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and Xerox. The specialty retail industry increased its blogging by from 4 companies on the 2008 list to 7 from the 2009 list. Included are companies such as Home Depot, Best Buy, Toys “R” Us and BJ’s Wholesale. This is perhaps because of the increasing awareness of social media marketing.

The big players seem to like blogs more. The top 100 companies on the list represent 39% of the 108 blogs in the 2009 F500.  In 2008, 38% of the total number of blogs came from the top 100. The top 200 companies in 2009 had 58% of the F500 blogs, while the bottom 200 (those listed 301-500) had 29% of the 2009 F500 blogs. They seem to be open to conversations as 90% percent of the Fortune 500 blogs take comments, have RSS feeds and take subscriptions. This is consistent with the 2008 findings. 

Of the 108 blogs located, 93 (86%) are linked directly to a corporate Twitter account. This is a three-fold increase from 2008. Twitter usage is now running ahead of blogs as 173 (35%) of the 2009 Fortune 500 has a Twitter account with a post within the past thirty days.  Only 4 protected their tweets and these were not included in the total.

The insurance industry has the most Twitter accounts (13) with It and telecom following with 10 each.  Like blogs size matters as 47% of the 173 twitter accounts belong to Fortune 500 companies in the top 200 while 35% come from those listed in the bottom 200 (201-500) on the 2009 list.

While there is growth in blogging in the Fortune 500 they are still blogging at a lower rate than the smaller Inc. 500 firms where 45% now have a blog.   You can find a complete listing of those with blogs and twitter accounts in the research paper.

So it seems that blogs and Twitter are taking hold. I found it interesting, but not surprising, that Twitter usage is higher. However, if you only tweet and do not blog you are not able to get comprehensive messages out and are generally pointing to the messages of others. Perhaps those Twitter only firms are just interested in getting sound bytes out. 

The Darwin Awareness Engine™ provides an easy way to keep track of all these tweets and blog posts.  You can set up Darwin Editions™ on your topic of interests, including what the Fortune 500 or the Inc. 500 are saying. 

 

Traackr Provides Useful Web Influence Monitoring Tool for Marketing and PR Professionals

For those who want to support a brand or simply better understand the thought leaders in a field, Traackr provides a comprehensive, yet very easy to use, tool set. I recently spoke with Derek Skaletsky and Courtney Vaught about their offering. Traackr enables you to discover the top 25 influencers in a topic of your choice. It is designed to primarily support PR efforts. It offers additional features to better enable interaction with these influencers once they are discovered, as well as the ability to monitor what they say about your areas or interest, including your brand.

Once you define the characteristics of your list, Traackr scans the social web to identify the most influential and most relevant people online and dynamically generates your Authority List. Each Authority List includes detailed profiles for each influencer with contact information, influence score, recent posts, an online identity card, and complete performance data. They look at channels such as blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook (when data publicly available).

Traackr provide three scores to hone in on a person’s influence:

Reach - Ability to generate views based on audience size

Resonance
- Ability to spark conversations based on such measures as retweets comments, and links

Relevance
- Ability to cover specific topic/market based on relevance to your selected keywords

Traackr has set up a sample A-List on PR 2.0 so you see how the list works. There is comprehensive detail on the social media behavior of each person listed. The results change on a weekly basis and I noticed that people do move up and down, and in and out. I found myself on it a few times and was number 22 this last time I looked. I used their list when I was working on setting up some lists for my firm.  You can also star people so they stay on the list even if their ranking metrics drops. Here is the list with the first five shown.

The Influencer Profiles have been split into separate tabs for easier navigation.  All the recent, relevant posts from that Influencer are in the first tab and their full online footprint is in a second tab.  Here is the footprint of the top person on the list above.

What I especially liked was the way you set the lists up. Traackr demonstrated this but also let me set up my own list so I could see how it worked.  You can use up to 50 key words and the Traackr staff provides guidance on this activity. I had initially selected about seven key words and they gave me good feedback on how to expand it.

You first test a key word and then generate examples of it on the Web.  This allowed me to see which ones remained on topic. I was looking for enterprise social media experts. I found that the term “social enterprise” was too general as it found socially conscious enterprises, as well as those using social media.  They also have a feature that rates your key words from broad to niche. Ones that are too broad are not useful. I was able to work through options and came up with an initial 21 key word phrases that passed the tests. You rank order the key words to determine their relative weight. It was a useful process as I was forced to think through what I was really looking for. Here is the key word list I generated for a list on enterprise social media.

Here is my list on enterprise social media based on the above keywords. I was somewhat surprised to find myself ranked highly but I really did not game the system for this. I am not sure that you can game it. I found many people that I already know and respected and others that were new to me.  Some were Twitter friends whose blogs I was less familiar with. I will continue to monitor the list as it changes weekly.

Since the Traackr tool is designed to help marketing and PR professionals in both agencies and within an enterprise there are other features to augment the A-List. When you login to your account, you will land on your Account Dashboard.  The Dashboard offers a summary of the activity in your account as well as a quick look at any New Influencers appearing on any of your lists.

You can export any of your Traackr A-List as a JSON data feed which will allow you to plug your influencer data into any other application of your choosing.  You also have the ability to "subscribe" to any of your Influencer Monitors via an RSS feed that you can plug into any standard RSS reader.  This will allow you to feed all of the posts from your Monitor into your reader.

You can also monitor the presence of terms such as your brand or a topic of interested in the writings of the top influencers. You also have other task support features such as notes and to-dos associated with individuals on the list.  As someone involved in the marketing of a software product I can certainly see the usefulness of this tool set. 

 

Twitter Provides Its Own Business Guide

There seems to be another consulting industry on the rise, consulting on business uses of twitter. Well, has provided its own business guide. As reported in thenextweb, the new version of business.twitter.com provides twitter success stores, ideas, tips, tools and resources.  It starts by defining what Twitter is and what it can do fro business. “As a business, you can use Twitter to quickly share information, gather market intelligence and insights, and build relationships with people who care about your company.” I would agree.

There are some interesting stats: 370,000 new sign-ups daily, 95,000,000 Tweets per day, 175,000,000 registered users.

One of the tutorials offers Twitter Best Practices.  It includes rules for both individual and large companies; share, listen, ask, respond, reward, demonstrate wider leadership & know-how, champion your stakeholders and establish the right voice.

More specifically give a glimpse of developing projects and events and reference articles and links about the bigger picture as it relates to your business. Be a good citizen and retweet and reply publicly to great tweets posted by your followers and customers. Listen and respond to compliments and feedback in real time. Sounds good. They even have a tweeter feed on the topic – @TwitterBusiness.

The site offers case studies: Best Buy, Etsy, JetBliue, and  Moxsie. The latter is a fashion company and it allows followers to get a peak at new trends and can gauge their reactions to these new ideas.  Best Buy uses tweeter to support its customer service. It empowered the its Geek Squad tech support service and corporate employees to staff their @twelpforce account on Twitter. Any Best Buy employee, working on company time, can provide answers using an @reply to the customer. In both cases it is about engagement and empowerment. With Moxsie it is engaging customers and with Best Buy, it is employees who, in turn, better engage customers.  

There is much more including information for developers on its API and advertisers on the analytics if offers them. I like Twitter’s business guide because it is accessible and clear. They are not the first software company to do this but they serve as a model for others. 

 

Twitter Comes to Google TV

Google TV has announced some of its partners and Twitter is on the list. According to the Twitter blog, Twitter on Google TV has most of the features and functionality in regaular Twitter. You can look through Tweets, @mentions, and favorites. When you click on a Tweet, you can reply, retweet, favorite, or share it. You see additional options depending on the content of the Tweet. For example, you can visit a URL or click a hashtag to search for it on Twitter.

If a user is mentioned, you can visit that user’s profile to see their Tweets or follow them. If there is a link to a photo or video, you can see a thumbnail version. Clicking the link will take you to the site so you can see a larger version of the photo or watch the video.

The search box provides access to trending topics and recent searches, so you can see popular topics and revisit past searches. Twitter for Google TV is preinstalled lets you share videos, web pages, pictures, and other content on the Web Twitter. You do this through the “Share” option and select Twitter. I think this is an essential feature so I am glad they enabled this.

We are pleased to see this development. You can now look at the trends in Twitter content through both the Darwin Awareness Engine™ and through our business partner, Twortex, which provides a Twitter content discovery tool using our technology and a variation of our content visualization methods.

This is part of the growing convergence of the Web and television. Forrester expects there will be 43 million internet-connected television sets in United States homes by 2015. Google TV also announced that several television networks and media companies, including HBO, the NBA, and CNBC would be its partners in offering Web content and programming to allow for on-demand viewing and apps built for TV.

NBC Universal said it will deploy CNBC Real-Time, which allows for stock-tracking on the screen alongside the live broadcast of CNBC business channel. The National Basketball Association created N.B.A. Game Time for following basketball news. So far the major networks, ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, are absent from Google’s partner list.

 

 

The AIIM 2010 State of the ECM Industry Report Looks at Social Media

AIIM has been producing a state of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) industry report for a number of years. The 2010 version was recently released. This annual report is based on over 700 responses from users across all industry sectors and sizes, and at all stages of ECM planning and adoption. There are great deal of useful findings related to ECM and I recommend looking at the complete report that can be downloaded form their site.

In this post I will mostly look at their social media findings. They found regarding social media and Enterprise 2.0, 29% of respondents view internal E2.0 as “imperative” or “significant” to their organization’s business goals, citing knowledge sharing, team collaboration and project coordination as the main drivers.  I was hoping for broader penetration but their audience seems to be at all stages of ECM use so these numbers may go beyond any biases that come  just looking at early adopters or vendors’ cherry picking of active users to see how the market as a whole is looking at enterprise 2.0.

They also found that 21% of respondents regard use of external social media as “imperative” or “significant” particularly as a marketing tool for publicity, and for customer feedback. I might have thought that external use would get higher results than internal but I am actually pleased to see the relative higher rating for internal use. That was what first got me interested in the possibilities of social media for business.

They found that staff access to Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Instant Messaging is barred in 45% of organizations.  This actually makes the numbers above look good. Their audience certainly includes a lot of overly protective firms so the overall results are certainly not biased with too many early adopters.

In addition, instant messages, Twitter posts and blog posts are not archived in 80% of the organizations using them. This represents a real lost opportunity, as there is a lot of great data about the conversations within an enterprise waiting for discovery in these social media.

The study found that 59% agree that social networking will make a dramatic change to business life in the next few years.  This is interesting given the much lower rates of adoption in the audience. However, 56% are inclined to see Twitter as a timewaster rather than “an important rapid-feedback tool”.  I guess many are part of the 45% companies than ban Twitter. 

Finally, the report states 60% find it easier to locate “knowledge” on the Web than on internal systems. I used to ask this question when I spoke on social media and knowledge management and I never found a single audience member who said it was easier to find content within their organization than on the Web. I guess my audiences were biased.  The same number, 60% of new ECM users, listed  “content chaos” as the trigger for adopting ECM so there is alignment of these results. It is an interesting report and worth looking at.

Content chaos is something that the Darwin Awareness Engine™ is designed to address. It can look into the content within most ECM systems to provide an understanding of the emerging trends that are occurring within the system.

 

 

Listening is a Key Component of Social Media Success

Joe McKendrick commented on the FastForward blog on a post by Irina Slutsky of Advertising Age, 'Chief Listeners' Use Technology to Track, Sort Company Mentions.  Irina profiles two Chief Listening Officers, Beth LaPierre at Kodak, and Susan Beebe at Dell. Beth is charged with sifting through 300,000 new mentions of Kodak a month. Susan performs a similar job of “broad listening” to Dell customers and consumers, and “giving all the intelligence to her Dell colleagues internally.” Irina reports that both Susan and Beth said their companies are driving innovation through customer feedback.

Susan says that there is a data-analysis research role to this job and she develops some complex queries to filter through the many mentions of Dell. Joe supports this activity but wonders if in a “era when markets and workplaces are conversations, every manager should be a chief listening officer.” Comprehensive listening is a role that Darwin’s Awareness Engine™ is designed to support. With the simplicity of its interface and the ability to quickly scan the context and relationships between themes emerging around topics of interest, it is also designed for the average business user and does not require technical expertise in devising complex queries.

Regardless of the title, there is strong listening component to any social media activities and those responsible for them need to monitor what is being said about their companies to understand the context and issues prior to starting social media activities. They also need to be able to monitor the impact of their efforts. Rob Paterson recently wrote about two such innovators, Baochi Nguyen at Boingo and Jordan Miller at Kotex.

Boingo supplies wifi to business travelers in many locations and Baochi Nguyen manages the Social Media Program. Rob writes that at Boingo, social media is not an add on, but is core to the firm’s philosophy. Like her counter parts at Dell and Kodak, Baochi main role is to listen rather than to market or sell and compares the role to a navigator on a ship. Senior management is actively involved and helped set the framework for her activities. This involvement is critical for the program’s success. Baochi also has great freedom to operate within this framework, another success factor. Rob said he first learned about Boingo’s social media efforts as a customer and enjoyed their rapid help through Twitter.

Jordan Miller leads the new Kotex social media campaign that is built around listening and engagement. She builds trust with Kotex followers through active listening and focused responses. The Kotex campaign is built around issues that interest their customers rather than promoting the features of their product. She is allowed to be edgy and develop a personal voice that is appreciated by her followers. Jordan and Kotex are now connected to a community of 1.4 million women who have found something important to them in the conversation. This is a great foundation for continued growth. Again listening and understanding the important themes within a large conversation will be a key success factor.

 

Traackr Provides Web Authority Lists for Market Areas

I came across Traackr through a tweet that mentioned my presence on one of the their Authority Lists.  So I followed up and found out a bit about them from their site. Traackr “identifies, qualifies and facilitates the engagement of top online influencers.” They sort through the massive amount of data within social media to “identify the most influential individuals in their community around specific issues, markets, brands. Traackr calculates influencers’ score based on proprietary algorithms to help marketers and PR professionals decide who they need to contact and how to reach these influencers.”

CNN recently reported that social media provides 43% of content sharing, running far ahead of email at 30%. The content sharing was primarily done by a subset of the total users. They noted that both news organizations and brands should study these influencers who share content.

Here is more from their site: Traackr's Online Authority List is a list of individuals steering online conversations about a specific market or topic. Traackr scans the social web to identify the most influential and most relevant people online and dynamically generates your Authority List. Each Authority List includes detailed profiles for each influencer with contact information, influence score, recent posts, an online identity card, and complete performance data.

They provide three scores:

Reach - Ability to generate views.

Resonance
- Ability to spark conversations.

Relevance
- Ability to cover specific topic/market.

I was pleased to make their A-List for Top PR2.0 Influencers, coming in at 19 in the list of 25. They listed three of my blogs including this one. This was a pleasant surprise, as I know some of the others on the list. My highest score was in resonance. This was even better and I would prefer this result. 

 

Social Media City Rankings Are Out

The NetProspex rankings are posted and I was pleased to see that my current town of Boston ranked fifth on the NetProspex list. The top four were, in order, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., New York, Austin, Texas. They also monitored the social media activity of employees at many companies in the US, and ranked them according to overall activity.  This order makes intuitive sense.  New Orleans, my home town, was ranked 48 as it has better things to do.

Their NetProspex Social Index (NPSI) was used to score and rank social network activity across a number of social networks, including Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook. The data was mined from their database of business contacts. There are three components to the score. First there is social connectedness: the number of employees with at least one social media profile. Second there is social friendliness and reach: the average number of connections per employee across major social networks. Third is social activity: the average number of tweets, number of followers, and number of users following.

The top ten verticals were, in order: search engines – portals, advertising & marketing, banking, traditional media, and toys & games, HR & recruiting, IT, software, consumer electronics, and retail apparel.  The last on the list (46 – 50): museums & art galleries, zoo & national parks, trucking, moving & storage, laundry, funeral homes.

They also looked at Twitter use in a separate listing. Some of those on the bottom rose to the top ten (in order): search engines – portals, traditional media, banking, advertising & marketing, zoo & national parks, beauty care, HR & recruiting, toys & games, IT, and software.  This list was the most counter intuitive of the various listing and thus, to me, the most interesting.

In addition, NetProspex looked at the social media usage by job roles. The top five were (in order): marketing, HR, communications & PR, IT, and sales. The bottom three were: payroll, treasurer, and maintenance. It is not surprising to see that the outward facing jobs are making greater use of social media. 

 

 

NPR is Expanding its Traditional Media Audience Through Social Media

Rob Paterson recently posted on: It's not the content but the connection that counts - NPR Rocks. He said that NPR is trying to attract an younger audience and has succeeded “not because of a content shift but because they made it easier for a younger audience to connect to content on their terms! The secret was in the flexibility of the new connection NOT the content.” They used social media and mobile apps to achieve this connection.

Rob points to Jolie O’Dell’s post on Mashable, How NPR Is Leveraging the Twitter Generation. She made this statement that I totally agree with.  “…the future of news media lies in successful integration of social media to get the attention (and click-throughs) of a younger generation — a generation whose news needs are vastly different than those of the generations that preceded it.” We recently cover how our client KETC, the PBS television station in St. Louis, is engaging in a successful integration of social media,

NPR is becoming a poster child for this social media effort. They found In a recent survey of more than 10,000 respondents, that its Twitter followers are younger, more connected to the social web, and more likely to access content through digital platforms such as NPR’s website, podcasts, mobile apps and Facebook. The survey found that, 59% of respondents said they use NPR.org, 39% listen to NPR’s podcasts, around half use an NPR mobile app and 28% access NPR via Facebook. The survey also found that, 77% of NPR’s Twitter followers said they get all or most of their news online. These Twitter followers are more likely to expect breaking news, likely because of Twitter’s real-time nature.

The Darwin Awareness Engine™ works in real time and can play a vital role in these social media integration efforts as it is doing at KETC.  In addition, the Darwin powered Twortex Twitter content discovery tool can help you find out what is happening on Twitter. 

Twortex Provides Twitter Search through Darwin Ecosystem’s Awareness Engine™

It can be addictive. Twortex is a Montreal based company that offers a free Twitter search engine powered by the Darwin Awareness Engine™.  I now use it to discover new conversations on Twitter and sometimes find items related to my topics of interest that I did not anticipate were connected to these topics. The Darwin Scan Cloud™ provides the top hundred themes connected to an attractor, our term for a search topic of interest. As you scan over it you can see related themes. Here is a Twortex Scan Cloud™ covering the term – enterprise20 – for the past 24 hours on 9/10. The actual tweets connected to these terms are seen on the right of the screen. Clicking on the listed tweet can take you to the actual tweet.

 Here is the search on tweets for the past 120 hours on 9/10 on the same term – enterprise20 – for the past 120 hours on 9/10. You can see the changes on coverage.

In the screen below you can see some interrelated terms highlighted in red after mousing over one of the terms in the scan cloud shown above.  This provides an alternative to traditional Twitter search that presents topics in a liner order that can make it harder to see trends and more difficult to quickly scan over a large amount of content. You can go to the Twortex site and register and to use it at no cost.  

 
 

Looking at the Early Growth of Twitter

There has been a lot written about the growth of Twitter. Hubspot recently provided some nice visualizations of this growth in the US in a guest post by Pete Warden, the founder of OpenHeatMap, a service that allows you to turn your spreadsheet data into a map. Pete noted that nine months after the creation of the service in March 2006, Twitter only had a few thousand users. A year later there were an estimated 150,000 people using the service.  He offered a s series of US maps illustrating the growth of Twitter across the US from 2006 to 2009.

Now there are over 93 million global unique users according to Social Media Today on August 15, 2010. As they point out that does not mean the same as 93 million regular users.  They mention the research from RJ Metrics showing that 83% of Twitter accounts are dormant every month. There is a base of committed users who are often active in other social media channels that make up for the majority of activity. I do not see an issue with this as that is the case wit most media.

Pete looked at the early days and Twitter provides data on new users by day. You can see spikes and flat areas of growth.  With a single influential blog post adding 250 new users in one day when there were only 600 users.  However, the continuous growth shows a service that users loved and shared with their friends, instead of one where traffic was driven by high-profile articles and hype.

In March 2007 Twitter won the top award at South-by-Southwest, and Pete wrote that this was when the service really started getting attention. He looked at several cites in this time period. “Austin had a massive growth spurt, from 61 to 402 users in three months, but what's interesting is that almost every other town also went through a similar rise, with Los Angeles going from 88 to 474 twitterers, and Boise jumping from 6 to 30. That roughly five-fold increase over the 3 months was remarkably evenly spread.” What surprised Pete was how little geography mattered for adoption.

He concludes, “one heartening thing for me and any other starving entrepreneur is how eclectic the initial growth was. There were spurts and slowdowns in the beginning, and while it was clearly a success story even at the time, the magnitude of their long-term trajectory wasn't obvious through the noise.”

This is encouraging to us at Darwin.  While we growth spurts around events where we presented such as Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise Search Summit, they continues to be steady interest.

 

Jimmy Fallon Continues to Link Twitter and TV and a new Potential for Innovation Management

I have been following the convergence traditional media and social media for a while and wrote about Jimmy Fallon in this context (see Social Media is Changing Late Night TV Landscape and Much More). Jimmy has now started his own hashtag: #whydonttheymakethat and solicited fan submissions, some of which made it on the air! Here is a link to a Late Night with Jimmy Fallon episode as Jimmy has some fun with this hashtag. He actually reads some interesting product ideas. While this has started as a humor stunt, there could be some crowdsouring potential here.

At a minimum it is another creative link of social media and traditional broadcast TV. He got thousands of tweets from his audience showing the power of TV to integrate with social media. The late night hashtag has become a regular part of the show. Some of these ideas were great and most were funny. Move over Cisco i-Prize and GE. 

I recently wrote that the convergence of TV and the Web is not waiting for the single box solution. Many creative efforts, such as this one are already occurring. I can see many business applications of Jimmy's approach. I would not be surprised if they are not already occurring. Have you seen any? 

US Colleges Running Ahead of Business in Use of Social Media for Recruiting

A new study by Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson, Social Media and College Admissions: Higher-Ed Beats Business in Adoption of New Tools for Third Year, suggests that US colleges are studying the "rules of engagement" in the online world in order to increase their effectiveness at recruiting prospective students.  This is the third year of their data collecting on this topic.

The longitudinal analysis shows that colleges and universities continue to embrace social media as their adoption of blogging again outpaces both the Fortune 500 (22% have a corporate blog) and the fast-growing Inc. 500 (42% have a corporate blog). The latest research shows 51% of colleges and universities have an admissions blog for their school. It is not limited to blogging. My alma mater, Tufts, has prospective students send them YouTube videos.

There have been many reports of business looking through social media to screen out prospective employees.  They should look to schools to learn of more positive ways to use social media for recruiting.  Colleges are also looking at social media for screening purposes. There was an increase in social media use for screening in 2009 while a decrease in the use of search engines for the same purpose.

Social networking, the social media that was most familiar to college admissions officers in 2007 and 2008 is still the most familiar. Familiarity with social networking has jumped from 55% reporting they were very familiar with it in 2007, to 63% in 2008 and now to 83%. Fifty-five percent of admissions officers report they are very familiar with Twitter.

This familiarity extends to usage as 95% of college admissions offices used at least one form of social media in 2009. Social networking is the most common form with 87% of admissions departments using it. Fifty-nine percent have a school Twitter account and, as noted above, 51% have a blog. In addition, more admissions departments feel that social media is “very important” to their future strategy than Inc. 500 businesses (50% compared to 43%). Good for them.

The colleges are also looking at social media to see what is being said about them. Fifty-three percent in 2007 and 54% in 2008 report they monitored the Internet for buzz, posts, conversations and news about their institution. The latest research shows an increase of close to 20% with 73% of schools now monitoring their school name. I wonder how that compares with business.

Barnes and Matteson at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research have conducted a number of studies on social media.  See for example, Social Media in the Inc. 500: 2007 – 2009. This one is another useful addition to their work. 

SuccessFactors Extend Its Enterprise Capabilities Through CubeTree Acquistion

I have written about CubeTree several times. The most recent was Cubetree engages its user community in product development. I also met a number of their executives at the last year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference so I was interested to learn that they have recently been acquired by SuccessFactors, another firm I have covered (see SuccessFactors: Bringing Web 2.0 to Talent Management). SuccessFactors is one of the world’s most widely deployed cloud-based business solutions. It is used by more than 8 million people within over 3,000 companies.

Recently, I spoke with Carlin Wiegner, the CubeTree CEO, about the impact of this acquisition and how CubeTree will fit within SuccessFactors.  First, he said that this move is opening a many more doors for them given the large installed base, new use cases in areas such as learning, and a larger sales force that SuccessFactors offers.  There is also great synergy between the two offerings. SuccessFactors has recently broadened their offering with the BizX performance management system that offers more robust support for knowledge workers.

The addition of Cubetree can take this BizX support to the next level with its many collaboration features. Individuals can quickly create rich profiles and begin engaging with others in their organization to get work done, find co-workers who can help, and share insights as they happen. Teams can make use of workspaces that enable groups to immediately gather around a project, collaborate, share documents and perform work tasks. Ciubetree also provides executive dashboards that offer insights into how a company is executing on a day-to-day basis. 

CubeTree will remain a separate brand as SucessFactors wanted CubeTree’s capabilities to both extend its own offerings and as an independent, but well aligned, offering.  For example, the SuccessFactor employee profile will now have CubeTree’s related communication and collaboration activities embedded within it.  Other aspects of CubeTree will findtheir way into the appropriate SuccessFactors offerings. The CubeTree micro-blogging feature will be embedded within SuccessFactors but also remain a separate free offering. 

Below is a sample screen from the micro-blogging feature. In this case you see a status update "in progress" where an employee is letting his co-workers know that he has wrapped up his current project and where he will be if they need him for the rest of the day. The CubeTree micro-blogging capability also integrates with Twitter. Below we see the same employee sending a notice about the release notes post to a customer who had a question about new features in this weeks release. By adding a custom hash tag (#cubetree) to his Twitter update it is posted to his CubeTree feed. He then adds a comment back that he is pushing it live on the blog.

CubeTree provides micro-blogging as a free feature and the other capabilities comes in a commercial package. I think this is a smart move as micro-blogging is the perfect way to introduce your offerings within an enterprise. It is easy to install and does not require integration with business process to obtain initial benefits. It can then be spread virally throughout an enterprise to quickly demonstrate value.

I also asked Carlin about what new features that CubeTree has introduced since our last conversation. They do frequent releases for continuous improvement but one of the main areas they have focused on is more robust email integration. CubeTree can work with any email client as it is not a plug in. Instead it sends messages that appear to the email client like any other message. This allows users to stay within email for many CubeTree activities. You can also have very robust email alert settings that can be easily turned on and off. Below you can see some of the robust email settings.

To complement the email integration there is also very robust mobile capabilities. Below you can see a message on a mobile device. The user is replying to an instant notification and posting it back to CubeTree

I like this combination as SuccessFactors and CubeTree nicely complement each other without bring redundancies to sort out.  Carlin said they sorted through several possible mergers. I do not know the other possibilities but I think they made a good choice. 

Yammer Extends Its Enterprise Microblogging Offering with Communities

Yammer was one of the first enterprise microblogging tools, and it continues to add features to extend the original concept of Twitter into an enterprise business application. A while back, I wrote about one case example, Implementing Enterprise Micro-messaging with Yammer at Océ., Océ is still an active user of Yammer. I was pleased to recently speak with Yammer’s VP of Marketing, Steve Apfelberg, about their capabilities and latest developments.  Steve said that many of their new features came from customer input. Here is a sample screen.

We began with an overview of some of the ways Yammer has extended the functionality of microblogging beyond Twitter to better serve business needs. First, they have not placed a 140 character limit on updates, or Yams, as they call them. There is a suggestion to keep things crisp but many business messages require more than 140 characters. I agree and have reluctantly avoided Twitter at times for this reason when it would have served a good purpose. 

Next, Yammer allows for file attachments. Twitter allows for links to documents but often you want to use microblogging as an internal distribution channel for things like the latest sales presentation. These attachments are stored in the Yammer cloud and become searchable in their own right, a useful feature.

Steve said that Yammer allows for public or private groups within each Yammer network. This is not like Tweetdeck groups as the feature allows you to indicate who can receive what updates and provides different access levels. Yammer also has more social networking functionality than Twitter as there is an enriched profile feature.  Samuel Dreissen at Océ said that the Yammer profiles helped spread usage. Samuel said he got more compliance with the profile completion in Yammer than in knowledge management systems because of the simplicity of the form.  As new users complete their profiles, the system guides you to invite your colleagues, which support the viral adoption of Yammer.

To further enhance social networking, Yammer also offers org charts that connect profiles. You can see how participants are connected and this can help you decide who to follow. Yammer provides suggestions on who you might want to follow that are partially based on the org charts. You can see a sample org chart below.

Yammer provides auto updates or Yams based on user actions such as joining a group or adjusting an org chart. There is two-way email integration. Steve said they did this since some people still live within email. You get email notifications if you want and can post to Yammer from email.

Users can “like” an update. This will then display the update in the message feed of all of their followers who do not follow the original message poster. I really liked this feature as it avoids spamming people with redundant messages but also does the work for you of trying to figure out who already saw the message and who did not.

You can use tagging through a hashtag in the same way you do with Twitter. Steve said this is something frequently used within their own firm to segment information into searchable topics.

We next discussed their latest major feature,Yammer Communities.  Steve said that many customers who were using Yammer for internal communication asked them if they could additionally utilize Yammer to collaborate with their external business network, including customers, partners, suppliers, and vendors.  Until now, this was not possible as Yammer required all members of a Yammer network to share a common, work email domain. 

Now Yammer Communities enables companies to create a new type of Yammer network that is not restricted to a common email domain.  The Communities option provides companies with a secure, private, and separate space to communicate with their external business contacts.  Membership, messages and other data in the Community are completely separate from membership, messages and data in the parent company network; users must toggle between networks to access these separate Community networks. It has all the features of the traditional or “canonical” instance of Yammer. People within a company can use both. Steve gave the example of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston that has used Yammer Communities to allow newly diagnosed cancer patients to communicate with cancer survivors in a secure manner.

Yammer provides both a free version and premium paid versions with expanded features. More than 10,000 companies and organizations created new Yammer networks in Q1 2010, bringing the total to more than 70,000. More than 70% of Fortune 500 companies are using Yammer and there are over 800,000 users. This is a testimony to the power of microblogging and to what Yammer brings to this capability. 

Research on Tweeting Inside and Outside the Enterprise

We need more research like this. I recently read an interesting study by my friend Kate Ehrlich at IBM and her colleague Sadat Shami, It is titled, Microblogging Inside and Outside the Workplace and looks at how corporate employees use microblogging tools. This effort conducted a content analysis comparing over 5,000 posts between March and June 2009 from individuals who were using an internal IBM proprietary tool, Blue Twit, and Twitter simultaneously.  Within these 5,000 plus posts, 58% were done with twitter and 42% were done with the internal tool so there is a reasonable balance for the comparison.

The abstract reports that in “both settings, posts that provided information or were directed to others were more common than posts on status. Within these categories, it was more frequent to provide information externally than internally but more common to ask questions either through broadcast or directed posts internally than externally.”  In other words, questions were more likely asked of colleagues within the trusted environment of the enterprise. This makes sense and it is nice some empirical evidence to support this assumption.

The users reported that Twitter was a great source to learn about and share breaking news that other sources, However, they were more likely to ask a question with their work community and more likely to proactively look for questions to answer within this same community.  The study reported that “participants talked of using Twitter as an alternative to an RSS feed or feed reader, because the information was already filtered to match their interests and they knew enough about the people providing the information to be confident in the quality of the information they provided.” This resonates well as it is exactly one of my main uses is Twitter.  

On the other hand, people inside the enterprise used micro-blogging, in part, to enhance their reputation as someone who is knowledgeable and helps the community.  In contrast many of the external posts were done to enhance the reputation and awareness of the organization by providing company news. In keeping with the differences in usage, 15% of the internal posts had links and 26% of the external ones did.

I think this is very useful study and more systematic work needs to be done in this space to supplement our intuition and anecdotal observations. 

Socialcast Adds Sharepoint and Outlook Integration, New Features, and Enhanced Metrics

Socialcast was one of the first enterprise microblogging providers (see 2008 post: Socialcast Brings Twitter Style Functionality into the Enterprise) and I have covered them several times since that first post (e.g., Socialcast Adds Broadcasting Capability to Enterprise Microsharing). Recently, I spoke with CEO Tim Young on the latest developments, which turned out to be quite a list.

We started at a high level. Tim sees a major shift in enterprise collaboration happening every twenty years: the business telephone exchange was introduced in the 1950s, the FAX in the1970s, email in the1990s and now activity streams – through tools like Socialcast – are starting to play a major role right on time, in 2010. I think there is certainly a movement beyond siloed email to the more transparent enterprise 2.0. Activity streams may be the tool that carries this transparency throughout the enterprise to reap the opportunity for increased awareness that enterprise 2.0 brings.

Socialcast is focusing its efforts on helping large enterprises, in particular those of 10,000 or more employees, increase their collaboration capabilities. I think this is a smart move given their capabilities and the market. To support this strategy they have made a number of moves, including enhanced features that we will look at: Outlook and SharePoint integration, and increased support for mobile devices. BlackBerry support has been added to their existing iPhone support, with an interface geared to align with BlackBerry features. All of these should appeal to the large enterprise user. They now refer to their role in the large enterprise as providing the enterprise activity stream engine or EASE. This capability can be deployed as a SaaS, a private cloud, or on-premises.

New features include the addition of automated updates to the stream based on user actions. Through their REST API they can mine these automated updates from almost any enterprise applications such as a CRM, data warehouse, or logistics system. Users operating within these systems can also submit manual updates in the traditional Twitter style without having to go into the Socliacast application itself. When someone replies to an update the reply is called a comment and it starts a threaded discussion on the topic.

In addition to the traditional microblogging follow/unfollow capability, there is the option for a universal update stream that users within a particular group can automatically follow using the enterprise’s LDAP. Socialcast can play in the foreground as the common interface to what is happening across many applications. Or it can operate in the background allowing users to stay within those applications. Email is one example of this. You can have Socialcast updates go into the email system, or you can use the email system to update Socialcast.

To further support this email integration, Socialcast has integrated with Outlook. Now Socialcast messages can be part of your Outlook folder and you never have to leave Outlook to use Socialcast. Currently, there is full support for Outlook 2003 and 2007, and 2010 will be supported soon. In the sample screenshot below, you can see Socialcast as part of the Outlook folder scheme and see Socialcast in operation with Outlook.

Tim said that the Outlook integration has proven to be a useful way to get late adopters within enterprise organizations participating in microblogging; people start within Outlook and many migrate to using Socialcast directly to access additional features. The SharePoint integration brings comprehensive microblogging capability to SharePoint and should provide a similar adoption path. There is support for SharePoint 2003, 2007, and 2010.

One of the major new areas is the addition of enhanced analytics that the company refers to as Socialcast Business Intelligence.  Some of its many features include organizational network analysis tools to identify the informal connections between individuals and groups. Socialcast reports on posting, commenting, and “liking” activity over time, offering insight into conversation initiation and response behaviors. There is also lurking and listening activity analysis. The interactivity patterns between users are identified, showing proactive and reactive relationships with others in their social graph.

Moments of transition from passive to active usage are also recognized, allowing you to find people and topics that start conversations. There is interactive visualization of all community discussions, surfacing the most active messages based on user interaction, popular posting times and dates. Here is an example of an activity analysis screen that shows a glimpse of overall network activity and top contributors, active teams and groups.

Here is an example of a deep dive into a user's activity, showing where he or she fits into the social graph.

Here is an example of the measurement of trending topics, important conversations, and influential members.

User roles are identified and defined as follows:  broker: spurs conversations that include input from a wide variety of users form different business units and departments, central connector: spurs diverse discussions from within their business unit or department, and peripheral player: engages infrequently and primarily with people from their business unit or department.  User activity levels are also reported on.

I was impressed with the depth and variety of analytics that Socialcast has conceived. I think it represents a strong step in the right direction of realizing the transparency that Enterprise 2.0 can provide. 

Pistachio Consulting is Updating their Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison

Pistachio Consulting published one of the first comprehensive surveys of the enterprise microsharing tools market in fall 2008 and I covered it here (see Pistachio Consulting’s Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison). This report is still available for free on their site. That report was based, in part, on a 15-question survey that they invited the tool providers to complete about their products. They verified the information and, in many cases, conducted follow-up interviews.

Much has happen since it first appeared and so Pistachio is developing an update now. For example, many of the enterprise collaboration application providers have integrated microsharing into their feature sets. In addition, many new features have been introduced to better adapt microsharing to the enterprise environment and to take advantage of the possibilities within the contained, secure, and trusted community that an enterprise offers. I am pleased to be involved with this new effort. We have expanded the questions to take these changes into consideration.

The new survey contains 31 questions to reflect the advances in current offerings. Pitaschio Consulting now invites interested enterprise microsharing vendors to participate in this new research effort. There is a brief explanation of each question. We look forward to sharing the results. The survey is now open and will be open for participation until Friday April 23, 2010 (see change to deadline below) . We will be again verifying the input and contacting many of the participating vendors for follow-up conversations.

I am helping conduct the research and write the report. Gina Minks, their intern, will offer additional enterprise perspective and assist in the process. Laura Fitton will provide her unique perspective on the microsharing space, and Marcia Conner will work closely on the report writing.

We look forward to producing something valuable for the enterprise 2.0 community. First, we need to input of enterprise microsharing tool providers. This includes those who provide a standalone microsharing application and those that include this capability in their application suite.  Here is the link to the survey again. 

Post Script: We have extended the deadline to complete the survey to May 3 and invite your participation. 

Social Media in the Inc. 500: 2007 - 2009

The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth conducted a study on social media by Nora Barnes and Eric Mattson on the usage of social media in fast-growing corporations. All interviews took place in October and November of 2009. The 2009 study looks again at the Inc. Magazine 500 social media usage for the third consecutive year, allowing for a longitudinal study of corporate use of social media.

In 2007, the study found that the Inc. 500 was outpacing the more traditional and larger Fortune 500 companies in their use of social media. For example, with blogs, the 2007 some research showed that 8% of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging compared to 19% of the Inc. 500. This difference continued in 2008 with 16% of the Fortune 500 blogging vs. 39% of the Inc. 500. And it appears the Inc. 500’s lead in blogging will continue in 2009 with the Inc. 500 now blogging at a rate of 45%.

This research shows that social media continues to penetrate parts of the business world at a fast rate. In all three studies, questions looked at with six prominent social media (blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, message boards and wikis).  In 2009, several new tools were added including Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and MySpace.

Social networking continues to be the most familiar social media tool to the Inc. 500 with 75% of respondents in 2009 claiming to be “very familiar with it” (compared to 57% in 2008). Twitter’s has captured “share of mind” in the first year of being studied with sixty-two percent of executives reported being familiar with it.

Looking across the three years, social networking and blogging have have continued to grow in adoption, the use of message boards, online video, wikis and podcasting has leveled off or declined. The addition of Twitter (considered by respondents to be both a microblogging site and a social networking site) in the latest study shows that 52% of the Inc. 500 companies are already using this tool for their business.

Forty-three percent of the 2009 Inc. 500 reported social media was “very important” to their business/marketing strategy and 91% of the Inc. 500 is using at least one social media tool in 2009 (up from 77% in 2008). In addition, as they ramp up their usage, the Inc. 500 companies are also seeking to protect themselves legally, with 36% having implemented a formal policy concerning blogging by their employees.

This is consistent with other studies I have seen in the past two years. It is nice to see the continued increase in social media use by business. It also makes sense. 

Web Trends to Watch in 2010 from Peter Cashmore

Here is another set of 2010 predictions. Peter Cashmore, CEO at Mashable provided 10 Web trends to watch in 2010 to CNN. They all seem likely but I want to focus on four that relate to Darwin Ecosystems Awareness Engine™: real-time ramps up, content 'curation,' cloud computing, and fame abundance, privacy scarcity.

Peter commented that, “sparked by Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, the real-time trend has been to the latter part of 2009 what "Web 2.0" was to 2007. The term represents the growing demand for immediacy in our interactions. Immediacy is compelling, engaging, highly addictive ... it's a sense of living in the now.”  Darwin’s Awareness Engine™ allows you to set the time frame you sample for relevant content. It operates in the immediacy of real time and can go back to the last few hours, days or weeks.  You can see what is emerging and where it is emerging. For example, the talk about Lou Dobbs’ actions a few weeks ago first emerged on the informal media of blogs before it appeared on the mainstream media.  By looking separately at informal and formal media we could see the hot topics on each.  Often the topics on informal media are predictors of what soon will hit the mainstream.

Peter wrote that, “The Web's biggest challenge of recent years is that content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it: "Information overload" has become an increasingly common complaint… In 2008, the answer revealed itself: Your friends are your filter… Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your consumption.”  I certainly agree here and Twitter has served this role for me.  Much of what I write about on my blogs comes from my Twitter friends, including the link to Peter Cashmore’s predictions. Darwin allows you to also become your own curator. You can set attractors on your topics of interest: people, places, concepts, and more. Then you can see what emerges. This can be especially valuable for niche areas. You can create your own online magazine. It can cover a much greater array of source than Google News and it will show the relationships between news items that emerge rather than simply displaying them. You can adjust your filters to further focus you’re your curation efforts. We see content curation as one of the major applications for the Darwin Awareness Engine™.

Peter added that, “Cloud computing was very much a buzzword of 2009, but there's no doubt this transition will continue.” We are a cloud application.

Finally, Peter wrote that, “Warhol was right: Fame is now abundant. Social media has birthed a galaxy of stars in thousands of niches: We're all reality stars now, on Facebook, Twitter and all the myriad online outlets where we hone our personal brands.” With Darwin we have the feature of rising stars and fading stars. You can see what topics are merging on the general Web or within you niche. You can also see the topics that are fading in importance.  These results are not based on popularity and are hard to push in spammy ways. The importance is based on the substance of the content itself and how it relates to other content within the target area, the whole Web or your subset.

I am pleased with Peter’s predictions for 2010 and look forward to the potential of Darwin playing a role within them.