Web Strategy by Jeremiah

I’m respecting your limited time by publishing this weekly summary, read the summary, then quickly scan headlines, read the bullet, then click to learn even more.

I’ve created a category called Digest (you can see archives) where you can start to track and access these going forward. Quickly scan the succinct and categorized headlines, read summary for analysis, and click link to dive in for more. You can subscribe to this digest tag only, which filters only these posts tagged digest.

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Web Strategy Summary
I was pleased to see that consolidation of the white label industry is already starting, this is needed as there are too many players in the space, expect more consolidations then some major acquisitions later this year. Continued scrutiny over social networking fatigue continues to pound away at Facebook and others, although the social networks are fighting back.

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Adoption: Helpful map shows adoption of SoNets on Earth
Worthy as the first story, this map shows how each social network has dominance in certain geographies, Out of all of those listed, I only did not know 4 of them, I’ll study up for next week. There’s an additional list here sorted by Alexa by country.

Downtime: Bebo has over 12 hours downtime in two months
This is downright embarrassing. 12 hours is barely acceptable in a whole year, let alone Jan-Feb of this year. Other culprits include Microsoft live spaces, Friendster then Hi5. Let’s hope downtime reduces for the rest of the year.

White Label: Acquisition of Social Platform by ONEsite
Expect more acquisitions to occur in this crowded market, Social Platform now mergers under ONEsite. I’m tracking this space closer on this post.

Mobile: Social Network for iPhone
Fon11 is a vendor planning on creating a social network for iPhone users. But why limit this to a particular phone type? Why not extend this to all mobile devices.

Innovation: Facebook allows 3rd parties to update newsfeed
Smart move here by Facebook, allowing it’s lifestyle social network to hook and display other areas of a members life right on it’s newspage. As long as this doesn’t get too spammish, expect this to be a success.

Fatigue: UK Facebook dips?
Facebook, the top social network in UK had a 5% reduction in usage in recent months, and reports from BBC, and techcrunch. Despite these claims, Facebook declares traffic is not dipping.

Fatigue: Piczo sees tough times
Once promising startup Piczo (aimed at teens, girls mainly) is seeing a slowdown in growth, and as a result has had some downsizing and layoffs. Maybe there are too many players in the space, or they didn’t differentiate.

Advertisements: Google to sell ads on YouTube
YouTube, a social network is a Google property that is going to monetize by selling ads, there’s a great opportunity to gain the TV advertising dollars if they can demonstrate success.

User Experience: Facebook ads Flash
With the added ability to add flash applications added to Facebook, an improved experience could result from members watching or interacting using rich media, games, or video.

Sensationalism: Fox blasts Facebook
Fox fires off a hot title to get readers, please friends, no website is going to rule over the other, there are no absolutes, no zero sum game.

If I’ve missed anything, let me know, I’ll be happy to add it to the next digest.

Sean O’Driscoll, who did a fantastic job, who has extensive experience managing the Microsoft MVP program has struck out on his own and has launched his own consulting shop Community Group Therapy.

Key highlights:

To be an effective community professional, you need to walk the talk and use the tools

Google is not a search engine, it’s a reputation tracker

Sean scored high on search engine results for Microsoft Support after a bad story was on Digg.com

Admits there are many buzzwords, yet many forget to look at the bigger picture

Rather than focusing on the Techcrunch/Scoble “Shiny Diamond” to develop a social media strategy

The 5 P’s of Social Media: People, Places, Process, Platform, Patterns

Process is potentially the most important P –but often overlooked

There are more smarter people about your product outside of your company

It’s good and horrible news that it’s easy to publish. Many fractures due to lack of strategy.

Google is the enemy of brand loyalty, if I can find the answer to a question not on your corporate property

Most advocates and influencers are not
helping to help a brand, they are helping other users.

“Pay it forward” a good model and metaphor how a community works

Participation:

Impacts to busienss: Customer Service and Support, Sales and Marketing, Innovation and Product Development

You can’t own the message and the audience is going to change it on their own

Word of Mouth has been a key driver why people buy what they buy, now with access to information through social tools greatly impacts this

Engagement is about brand inclusion, making sure people have their voiced involved

We’ve all seen ugly babies but never had one. We’ve strong attraction to our own products. Uses a MS open source as a case study

Beta is not early enough to get your community involved

If you want raving fans, get affinity, talks about Harley Davidson

Influencer Framework in Web 1.0: Envision and develop, test and release, and sell and support

Suggests that social aspect of employees were only in sell and support aspect, not other areas

Sean had an executive champion, Steve Ballmer

Social graph: as a business strategy we should think about it as

For some reason, webex auto-showed webcams (powerbook users?) which was a potential major hazard for those who did not know they were being streamed at their desk. This needs to be fixed, could be a major embarrassment for folks.

Also the chat room in the webex client was very active, I saw Kevin Marks, Marita, Pistachio and others chiming away. The organizer said this chat room was the one of the most active they’ve ever seen. Twitter was a big recruiter.

There are several graphics that I could not effectively blog to text, I’ll link to the slides if they are published.

When I live blog webinars or conferences (even doing screen grabs), not only does it help everyone else, but it helps me to get smarter. Writing really helps to cement knowledge to actionable work.

Thanks Sean and thanks SAP for hosting this!

Tagged SAP Salon

New to reading me and want a hundred word summary? Sam Lawrence of Jive Software has compiled tag clouds of 10 bloggers he reads and has done a quick and dirty analysis of what we frequently talk about.

What’s a tag cloud? It’s a collection of terms or keywords found in content or vernacular. It looks like he’s using IBM’s many eyes software to compile the cloud, which shows the heavier weighted or frequent terms in larger font. The cloud is comprised of words that aren’t necessarily in my wordpress categories, so it appears to be crawling and analyzing text.

While tag clouds certainly are interesting, not everyone agrees they are helpful such as expert Thomas Vanderwal, Brian has the story.

I’m starting a new series, called Social Media Frequently Asked Questions. It’s a collection of the top asked questions I hear over and over. I’m putting them here on my blog is a great place to help everyone quickly get educated, convince their boss, or be able to help their clients get over these hurdles, pass them around.

Social Media FAQ #3: How Do I Measure ROI?

This question often creeps up at the end of a webinar or presentation that I give. While we often sing the goodness of social media tools, (and challenges) a web strategist will have to return to the workplace, and demonstrate to their management the value of any program –especially if it’s new.

Is it possible?
In 2005-2006 we debated if this was actually possible, the argument against the ROI of blogging was as difficult as measuring humans. In fact, until we can measure the impact of a conversation between an employee and a prospect at a coffee shop, it was difficult to measure social media. For me, that all changed when Charlene posted the ROI of GM’s Fastlane blog (this was long before I even thought about working with her).

What are you trying to accomplish?
Measuring “new” media isn’t as different as measuring “old” media, the trick is to figure out what your goal is first, is it to spread a message among a community? Is it to reduce support costs? Is it to learn from your community? In each of these cases you’ll have to then assign the right attributes to measure against.

New attributes for new tools
Next, you’ll need to realize that this new media actually has some new attributes (the limited page view attribute is no longer sufficient in this dimensional world), and there are some new attributes to think about (read the white paper I co-authored with Matt Toll of Dow Jones), such as authority, interaction, velocity, attention, sentiment, and actions. You’ll notice I left out the elusive engagement word, it’s used differently by everyone in the industry that it still hasn’t taken hold.

Benchmark
Lastly, you’ll benchmark your programs based upon your goals and those attributes, and you’ll come to some specifics. I’m actually leaving many, many steps out, but those are the high level tasks. You’ll likely need an expert, new tools, and probably a vendor (see my full list), doing it manually is very tedious.

More resources, posts, white papers, videos
Actually, nothing I’ve said here is new, I’ve written about it time (here’s a similar post with more detail) and time over, read all my posts tagged social media measurement.

Update: A few hours later I see this timely article from Computerworld on Life after page views: Web analytics 2.0