Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 / Social networking Building Social Networks for Dollars
Tamir Levin
Why Now?
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Low barriers to entry, in investment costs, running costs and prerequisite skills
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Low TCO, open architecture, no proprietary lock-ins, either overt or covert
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Evidence of take-up by Generation X/Y
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Emergence of a community of participation in an open multisided marketplace around the product or service The possibility that knowledge work can become more effective and more efficient, not just in the enterprise, but in health, education and welfare. Globally
Why Now? -! What are business drivers that got us interested in this area? -! Why is it an opportune time to invest in this area? -! What other factors are playing a role here?
TRENDS
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Some current trends
Online Conversations # Active Blogs
Your clients are leading a massive, global conversation about products, services, and companies. Today, there are over 100 million blogs and 10 to 20 million Internet discussion boards and forums in the English language. Social networks, with an estimated global audience of over 500 Million users, along with emails, chats and text messages are used to discuss what, when, and how your clients buy. In this brave new world, your clients are leading the discussion, define the agenda and influence in new ways. More importantly, they facilitate the notion that credibility is no longer an exclusive domain that belongs to companies and publishers, but now belong to everyone who wishes to participate and engage with it.
If it were a country, MySpace would be the seventh biggest, ahead of Russia
Trend #2
Social networks around the globe are serving as a new social glue to a wide group age. With over 400 million registered users combined, these networks provide a glimpse into the future of social computing – largely based on connections, conversations and mass collaboration. Never before, have we had such far reaching computing platforms that facilitated mass communications between large numbers of individuals.
The Social Graph The network of connections that exist in the world through which people communicate and share information
PeopleYou. Your Clients. Their Clients. Their Friends. Trend #3 More organizations are realizing the power of the network effect (the social graph). When interacting with your clients online, you are no longer dealing with individuals but with individuals and their own networks. By transporting their network connections across websites and social networks, your clients can, for the first time, give you access to a wider audience that has been hidden from you in the past.
CUSTOMERS WANT TO CO-CREATE VALUE
Trend #4
Using the blog paradigm, you can now create a chain reaction that is based just on your core clients. By providing a more advanced engagement model (be it a blog, social applications or a combination of other tools) you can engage your clients and turn them into your “agents� ("activate"). Once they have activated their own networks and engaged with their own contacts through your brand, product or services (preferably using your own platform) they will participate and contribute. They would want you to listen to them and in fact, they would rather share in the creation of value ("talk back") rather than just receive value from you.
Will provide primary research services to financial markets, the LinkedIn Research Network.
Friends Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. A free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the internet. Supported by Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, Yahoo
Google’s opensocial Provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites.
XMPP
XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) is an infrastructure connection protocol that can be used as presence “glue” across social 'spaces'
The introduction of social software tools and standards for aggregation, syndication and collaboration is about to change the technology landscape and the ways in which you engage with your clients (and employees). The traditional view of systems and applications as defined and understood by both users and vendors is rapidly becoming absolute. An application or system that facilitates interaction using these new social paradigms, shifts from being what you build or what you buy to what you do with the software assets under your control. In other words, the definition of an application itself shifts from some monolithic, and often expensive to maintain, siloed asset, to endlessly recombining capabilities of shared assets. New open standards and solutions in social software and computing platforms are being introduced to enable rapid developments that support these new trends and opportunities. Adoption of these principles and tools, and in some case, integration with existing systems, is already happening across various industries, including in Australia. Examples of such standards and tools are list here
Online Forums are the foundations for social networks
CASE STUDY: Prior to the introduction of multifaceted social tools and new engagement models, the most commonly used and sophisticated forms of interaction with your users (clients) were asynchronous online forum, such as this. Thorntree is Lonely Planet"s flagship “community� and despite its limitations and lack of rich tools, it hosts thousands of conversations and has 500K registered users. However, in order to remain a market leader and a trusted source of travel information online, Lonely Planet is looking to engage with travelers in more complex and profound ways, including video and images, travel planning tools and dynamic community building features (such as groups) that will support and enhance the complete travel cycle. (Tamir Levin was a CTO of Lonely Planet publications until April 2008 and is responsible for defining its forum and community vision and strategy)
Enterprises are facilitating online conversations using private label social networks
The best way to understand and serve your customers is to talk to them directly, wherever you may be located. With customers in over 100 countries, Dell was facing a monumental challenge. It is with this mindset that Dell created IdeaStorm to establish and support an online community that brings everyone – customers, potential customers and company experts - closer to the creative side of technology by allowing them to share ideas and collaborate with one another. The goal is for the customer to tell Dell what new products or services they"d like to see Dell develop and by doing so - fostering a candid and robust conversation about their ideas. Following the Dell example, companies should consider new ways to engage with their clients in meangful ways, online. Dell"s move demonstrates a shift from general purpose online social gathering places (like facebook, myspace) to enterprise branded and private label social networks. The term "Enterprise 2.0" is best descibed as the adoption of web 2.0 principles and concepts in commercial environments where clients are expecting deeper forms of engagement with the enterprise - much like their current web 2.0 social networks experiance.
Building Private Label Social Networks
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Brand building environments
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Community Building tools
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Viral Features
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Social Glue
www.cleartextsystems.com With moves by major Internet sites toward a more open, “social Web” including Google"s new FriendConnect service, I think that social networks and virtual worlds play a significant part in how companies communicate, engage and do business online. Private-label social networks can offer the following: 1. Brand building environments. Not so long ago “online communities” were forums or message boards attached to company websites - where customers interact with one another and with company representatives. Facilitating these conversations is increasingly important and is a viable way to get your brand in front of people on a recurring basis. Because of their multidimensional attributes, social networks take message boards to an entirely new level of interactivity and engagement. 2. Community building tools. Online forums allowed members to post messages or respond to messages. Custom social networks allow members to express themselves through multimedia features including blogs, blog comments, page comments, photo & video and audio uploads as well as links to other networks. The community can create more content in more ways than ever, tipping the publishing power from strictly the company hosting the community to the members themselves. 3. Viral features. In the “old days,” online forums relied mostly on word of mouth or happenstance to build their memberships. Today, social networks provide tools that let members spread the word about the networks through widgets, easily invite other members into the network, and even see what other members are doing through activity feeds so they can do it, too. 4. Social glue. There is nothing more powerful online than the strength of social bonds. When people connect with people they know or through people they know, they are more likely to interact and return to a community because they have a social investment in that community. By building social networks, companies can use social bonding to keep people coming back for more.
Enterprise Social Software Platforms
Clearspace, by Jive software, is an example of a well integrated, highly customizable social network platform. Find out more on http://jivesoftware.com
Enterprise Social Software Platforms
Ringside Networks is [one of a few] open source social networks initiatives that provide websites everything they need to become socially aware. It allows sites to bring to their customers a social platform where they can connect community, users and other applications anywhere in a connected environment. Http://ringsidenetworks.com
Tamir Levin can be contacted at tamir@tamirlevin.com or +61 420 981 180