community software applications

Social shopping sites ringing up sales

jim wilde — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:39:34 +0000

With social shopping sites, product blogs and online ratings and reviews consumers have the means to communicate their opinions about products and companies to tens of thousands of other consumers like themselves at a critical point in the sales cycle - the beginning.

Amazon figured out social shopping and e-comm - social e-commerce - a long time ago. They made it easy for consumers (aka prosumers) to make recommendations, write reviews and then share the information with other users. Although, I am not surprised that these ideas failed to catch on with most businesses. Interestingly, most businesses today are missing out on web 2.0 too.

Take a look around the net. Most business and e-comm sites fail on customer experience. They have old, static, out-dated product information with few methods of finding what you want or sharing what you find.

Anyway, below is a link to updated information about social shopping consumers and social software tools. "The Growing Influence of Online Social Shoppers" is from eMarketer.

"Now with social shopping sites, product blogs and online ratings and reviews consumers have the means to communicate their opinions about products and companies to tens of thousands of other consumers like themselves at a critical point in the sales cycle - the beginning.

While blogs and customer ratings and reviews have long been a familiar part of the Internet commercial landscape, says Jeff Grau, eMarketer Senior Analyst and author of the new report, Consumer Interactions: Social Shopping, Blogs and Reviews, over the past two years social shopping sites have emerged as another way for customers to share product experiences and opinions."

Most of these web 2.0 and social software applications are becoming critical to businesses.

What's your experience? Who do you pay attention to for purchasing information? How do you find stuff on the long-tail? What other social commerce applications or sites are you familiar with?

Tags:

Social Media:

Web 2.0 and customer support

jim wilde — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:57:09 +0000

Have you ever landed on a web site that was like a museum - look but don't touch?

You know, the static ones with old information. Or one where you couldn't find the information you wanted? The kind where the customers needs were an after thought. I dread those. You see them all over the web. From small business sites to medium ones and even large company sites. They all suck.

On the flip side, one of the oldest interactive e-comm sites on the net has to be Amazon. In most cases, they make it easy to make a decision. They have user reviews, ratings, comparing, search, recommendations, commenting, etc. - highly interactive social stuff. Its about me, we, the customer, people, sharing, contributing, participating. I love it!

Which one works best?

Did you know, you don't have to spend a fortune to achieve Amazonian results? Size of business, small, medium, large does not matter these days. There is lots of free, web 2.0 open-source software that support all of the Amazon social features and functions as well as dynamic content (text, images, video), newsletters, rss and more. Customers, even your own employees, are expecting a better social experience from your site. One more thing, the search engines love social sites.

Consider the following links a gift. They are all about social media, customers, and marketing.

Ok, that was my 2 cents. What's your experience with social commerce sites or social shopping?

Tags:

interactive web sites

social commerce

Social Media:

Collaborative innovation

jim wilde — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:05:45 +0000

Ideas take life when they are shared. That is why the web is such a potent platform for creativity and innovation.

Here's a nice film promoting Charles Leadbetter's new book "We Think". The book is about collaborative innovation on the net.

From Mr. Leadbetter's site, "Welcome to We-think: mass innovation, not mass production

WeThink explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information.

Ideas take life when they are shared. That is why the web is such a potent platform for creativity and innovation.

It's also at the heart of why the web should be good for : democracy, by giving more people a voice and the ability to organise themselves; freedom, by giving more people the opportunity to be creative and equality, by allowing knowledge to be set free. An example of a simple idea management system.

But sharing also brings with it dilemmas.

It leaves us more open to abus and invasions of privacy.

Participation is not always a good thing: it can just create a cacophony.

Collaboration is sustained and reliable only under conditions which allow for self organisation."

Business managers should be thinking about using social software applications and collaborative tools to engage and support customers. What do you think about social media, social commerce, and applications that make it easy to find, create, and share in conversations? ...Is there any value?

Tags:

Social Media:

Improving customer services with social networking software.

jim wilde — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 12:05:22 +0000

Customer facing employees using social networking software are improving customer services.

Employees are able to collaborate and share what they know with other employees and learn what they don't know about customers. To go further, these social applications can be opened up so parts of the them (idea management) can help customers provide feedback, make reviews, or share ideas on how to improve products and services. This works. Take a look at Amazon.

Social networking, social applications, web 2.0, collaboration tools have become powerful influencers on and off the web. People are sharing information (text, images, videos) about everything - including your products and services.

"Don't be scared or rattled by this development. Survey after survey has established that buyers trust each other more than any other source in helping them make informed buying decisions. MediaPost noted that in 1977, 67 percent of people polled in a research study said they were moved to take some sort of action by word-of-mouth influence. In 2003, that number had risen to 92 percent. Pollsters and magazines like Consumer Reports have for many years taken on the dirty work of telling us what customers think. The social internet has simply stripped out the
middleman, making it possible for people to converse directly with each other quickly and in their own words." From My Custome, "Customers control your message (and why that's a good thing)", by Phil Gillin.

Businesses and corporations are using these new technologies to improve customer services, work flow, idea management, information sharing, information flow, project management, education, and training.

So, stop reading about social software applications and collaboration tools. Unleash your imagination and start experimenting with them. The real value and power of social software can only be appreciated with hands-on experience. Try this, a short-term, pilot project to discover and evaluate solutions based on results.

Tags:

Social Media:

collaborative software

rich learning environments

Keeping up with rapidly changing times.

jim wilde — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 13:07:34 +0000

Applying open source ideas to business.

The open-source software movement developed because people had an "itch to scratch". One that "off-the-shelf" software did not support or was too costly to use. In the open source community people want to contribute, learn and share their knowledge and experience. They want to participate in a rich learning environment. They want to be able to get their work done and make a difference. We know from experience that these ideas work in a business environment.

With many open-source communities having thousands of developers and users - it is a mistake to believe that these ideas would not apply in business.

"Did You Know; Shift Happens - Globalization; Information Age" video by Karl Fisch.

Here are several more ideas that fit any size project. They are centered around using social software and virtual communities to help employees, stakeholders, partners, deal with rapidly changing times.

internal communications, how people work together - collaborate,
amplify talent development through rich learning environments,
social web and rich internet and intranet applications to meet ever changing market demands,
innovation around networks of people,
idea and resource exchanges across the organization,

"Ketchum report: Media Myths and realities and Gary Hamel" by Alan Moore on Communities Dominate Brands.

Tags:

open source

business

internal communications

contributing

filtering ideas

Social Media:

private social network applications

Social Networks, Communities, & Rich Learning Environments

jim wilde — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:46:28 +0000

How to create a rich online learning environment.

The following two posts are about advertising and new business models. My interests in them is about how we learn new things, share ideas, social information management (SIM) and flow in a workplace social network or community. In other words, how do we create a rich learning environment? One that helps employees and stakeholders sort through the clutter?

Note: I'm grateful for smart people like Mr. Hagel and Ms. Dyson. They help me clarify ideas that I simply don't have the time or skill to write about.

edge perspectives, John Hagel, "Shift Happens â€“ The Future of Advertising...social network sites provide increasingly robust platforms for us to learn about what our friends are interested in and purchasing (although in many cases still trying to figure out the appropriate balance between privacy and attention).

"Release 0.9: Don't Cry For Me, MicroHoogle!,"Esther Dyson

"User-managed metadata

...the new world of social networks, user-generated content and metadata. These aren't the "walled gardens" of yore, controlled spaces offered by outfits such as AOL. These are walled gardens custom-made by users for themselves.

Facebook, unwittingly or on purpose, has been teaching people to manage their own data about themselves. While Facebook's launch of the Beacon user-as-product-shill service was a PR fiasco, it familiarized millions of users with the notion that they can control information about themselves online and determine to whom it is visible. What might seem a horribly complex and tedious task to their elders - categorizing "friends," managing newsfeeds, handling intersecting communities of contacts - feels natural to the Facebook users of today. They want more granularity of control, not less."

I'm practicing what we've been trying to pass on to clients about social software - learn new things. I picked up on Mr. Hagel's post from two sources. One was here, and the other was on a private social bookmarking site.

Tags:

sponsorship fee

diminishing-returns efficient

SIM

choke-points

Social Media:

community software management

social informatin management

How Social Media and Web 2.0 Work In Business

jim wilde — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:35:38 +0000

Web 2.0, social software has to be used to be fully appreciated.

The following three posts have a wealth of information, ideas and tips for business managers and CIO's about social media, web 2.0, social networking, and online communities. The fact is, this stuff, social software has to be used to be fully appreciated. It takes time to grasp its power and usefulness. Workplace social software and communities need to be understood from both, a regular user view point and from an administrator (control) view point. You bet, this is work. There are no hurry-up or easy solutions in a workplace or community environment but the benefits are gigantic.

From BusinessWeek, "Social Media Will Change Your Business. Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch upâ€¦or catch you later."

From Wired, "The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits to You. You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web.

From CIO Insight, by Edward Cone, "Try It, You`ll Like It.

Web 2.0 applications must be experienced hands-on to be appreciated, but most CIOs don't take the opportunity.

If you are not on Facebook, if you have never created and maintained a blog, then maybe you aren't putting enough thought into your job.

...understanding Web 2.0 applications is important to your business, and you need to spend some quality time using them to really get what they're all about. The power of user-driven tools lies in the using. Just reading about them, or spending an hour or two playing with them, doesn't do them justice; you've got to go hands-on to appreciate their power."

Assigning order to a chaotic process. People in businesses are using social software and virtual communities to relate ideas, stories and information to each other in, say, a gigantic learning and development environment. It helps them spot new business opportunities before the competition does, create a meeting place, be open to radical opportunities, break down silos, support experimentation, enable managers to represent the customer vis-Ã -vis their own organizations, and help everyone move forward.

Tags:

Social Media:

Marketing 1.0 to 2.0 considerations

jim wilde — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:09:38 +0000

Can brands cope with consumer participation?

I'm trying to find a theme that connects the following posts. One theme might be on the transition from marketing 1.0 to marketing 2.0? Hint! Hint! Take the time to read the comments on them - they are fantastic.

" Is Marketing A Discipline In Crisis?" by Tom Guarriello, thetruetalk blog. These are Tom's thoughts about goog "having serious difficulty figuring out a workable ad model for social networking sites", and his first day at the BRITE Conference.

Tom, "OK, so, I come away feeling like this: when the best in the business [goog]
can't figure out how to monetize a hugely developing marketplace [social networking sites], and a room full of senior people can't come up with better thoughts than the ones I heard today (an unreasonably generalized conclusion, to be sure), I worry that the emperor is skinny dippin'."

"Podcast: Expert insight or human engagement?" by Johnnie Moore.

"A couple of days ago, I blogged about two posts by Sean Howard and Piers Fawkes. They seemed to have a common thread of dissatisfaction with business-as-usual (in stakeholder research for Sean, and trendspotting for Piers)." Be sure to check out Piers post, "The Problem With The Trends (Business)".

"can brands cope with consumer participation?" from Influx by Ed Cotton.

"Influx and many others have been following and reporting on the Marketing 2.0 trend which suggests a new open environment of participation between brands and their customers.
The catalyst of the internet has made all the possible and brands now have the power and potential to engage in real dialog.

...it appears that most marketing departments aren't yet designed and organized to manage and cope with Marketing 2.0, most are still working and structured for a 1.0 world.

Tags:

Social Media:

Mobile Social Networking and Communities Growing

jim wilde — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:59:48 +0000

Think foursquares.

Wow - Check out this article, "Mobile Social Networking Revenues Could Reach Us$52 Billion by 2012", from Cellular News.

"Mobile Social Networking is already an established service in some regions, but in 2008 and beyond new features are attracting larger numbers of users and permitting new business opportunities. Mobile Social Networking is now a global phenomenon with expansion in all directions.

Over the next 24 months communities which foster friendships will continue strong growth in users and revenues. Entertainment community segment revenues will overtake in some regions in 2010. Other community segments focusing on productivity, fame and social shopping are beginning to emerge on mobile platforms, diversifying the offers and attracting people of different socioeconomic and demographic profiles to Mobile Social Networking services."

Tags:

business opportunities

productivity

mobile social networking

Social Media:

Social Applications Will Thrive In A Recession

jim wilde — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:26:51 +0000

"...social applications are about consideration, not awareness. Blogs, word of mouth, social networks... they're about people connecting with other people."

I pulled this post from Conversation starter, "Why Social Applications Will Thrive In A Recession". It was posted by Josh Bernoff .

"...social applications are about consideration, not awareness. Blogs, word of mouth, social networks... they're about people connecting with other people. You may resist advertising if your finances are tight, but if your bud tells you that new movie is really worth seeing or that the Gap has the cutest new tops, that's more persuasive than advertising. Basically, in a recession, the consideration phase is more important than awareness -- and that's where advertising flops and social applications succeed.

* It's cheap. Social applications can be nearly free (think blogs, Ning.com, facebook pages) and even more sophisticated communities are typically $30K to $200K -- a lot cheaper than a significant sized ad campaign. After our last post, all the responses were positive. One interactive marketer from a highly cyclical company told us this:

"Budgets are tight in light of the economic conditions as you surmise, but [the budget for social applications] has not been impacted. We are still keen to move forward with our trial and have supportâ€¦.at this point anyway. Interactive in general has been more protected than other comms areas and saw an increase."

* It's measurable. If your social application doesn't have a measurable output, you'd better get one. But if it does -- if it generates leads, or conversions, or buzz, or something useful -- then you can prove it's working. beinggirl.com is four times as effective as TV ads, Procter & Gamble told us. That won't get cut in a recession."

Josh Bernoff is a vice president at Forrester Research and the author, with Charlene Li, of the forthcoming book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

Tags:

Social Media:

community software management

Community Software Solutions

jim wilde — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:38:16 +0000

Understanding online communities, social media, social media tools, and social commerce are important to your business, and you need to spend some quality time using them to really get what they're all about. The power of user-driven tools lies in the using. Just reading about them, or spending an hour or two playing with them, doesn't do them justice; you've got to go hands-on to appreciate their power. Start a project, reap the benefits.

Social media tools generate increasing value (online sales and productivity) as the number of participants expands. They offer benefits that traditional business strategies, rigid IT software, and static web sites fail to address. Stay connected - RSS Feeds/Site Map

Business Social Media Solutions:

Social Network Software - Expertise Locator - Collaboration Platform - Knowledge Management - Community Software - Interactive Portals - Content and User Management - Open Innovation Platform - Classification Bookmarking - Idea Management - Multi-site Platform.

Contact us for demo information or call 973.433.4007. The demo is of a comprehensive online business community software solution. One with a tightly integrated set of publishing, communication, and networking features that support and enable a new type of productivity. Members can connect, create, and share their content (video, text, images), spur mashups, in a multitude of ways to achieve greater performance.

Business Development Ideas -- Organizations of all sizes are using Social Media Tools - Community Solutions to leverage information in new ways and to discover new ways of doing business.

From IDC, "...self-service applications [social software] used by groups and marketing campaign teams; brand applications that focus on persistent customer engagement; and enterprise applications that provide more effective ways of working with customers, partners, and other external parties"

Give us a call, 973.433.4007, to learn how corporate social networking applications and community software solutions can help your business become more productive, connected, and engaging.

Image from Kathy Sierra,"User Community and ROI. Think about all the things a strong user community can do for you: tech support, user training, marketing (evangelism, word of mouth), third-party add-ons, even new product ideas. And that's not including any extra sales you might make on community/tribe items..."

Tags:

sharing

open innovation

communities

orchestrating resources

Social Media:

Open Source CMS

social information management

What do we call personal information management when it moves into shared online spaces?

jim wilde — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:43:03 +0000

The net is getting smarter... Things change fast these days... Knowledge, deep smarts, information, data are everywhere... So, people who have the ability, all of us, to imagine and connect dots will thrive.

Not so fast. I often times get caught up in what I know about social networking and information management - the curse of knowledge. I assume that most people are familiar with the ideas of social information management. They aren't.

Anyway, I came across a blog post (from the blogroll - an rss agregator), by Jon Udell, "Social Information Management".

Jon, "For much of my career I've been exploring ways to bring people and information together in shared online spaces. Groupware, social software, the semantic web, the giant global graph, it's all the same to me in one fundamental way. When we push information into shared spaces, data finds data, and people find people, and all sorts of magic happens.

What do all these acts have in common?

- I publish a blog entry about a technique I just learned.

- I geocode a photo on Flickr.

- I curate a list on del.icio.us.

- I add to a Wikipedia page.

- I arrange a dinner using Windows Live Events.

Here's a related post, "Discovering versus teaching principles of social information management", from Jon.

These ideas should be taught in high school or at the same time kids are learning to get around the library catalog system.

With organizations and business, these ideas should be explored by business development managers and by those employees or managers responsible for interal training, learning, and education.

Tags:

sharing

collaboration

connecting

personal information management

udell

shared spaces

Social Media:

Open Source CMS

Younger Generations Use Technology Differently

jim wilde — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:38:28 +0000

Not only do younger generations perceive technology differently from their elders, but they use it differently, too.

Younger generations [future customers and employees] rarely notice the technology in the devices they use. Baby boomers raised in the 1960s only saw the programming and didn't think much, if at all, about the technology and infrastructure that brought them Bonanza, The Ed Sullivan Show and Laugh-In.
Not only do younger generations perceive technology differently from their elders, including the CIOs and other executives who manage IT organizations and corporations, but they use it differently, too.

Wikinomics author Don Tapscott tells a story of a young woman who doesn't use e-mail, instead relying on instant messaging, texting and posting on Facebook [social networking application and community] to communicate. "E-mail is for old people," she told Tapscott. "Maybe I'd send an e-mail as a thank you note to the parents of a friend.""

"Age Determines Technology's Value" from CIOInsight.

Tags:

Social Media:

corporate social network solutions

Open Source CMS

Social Networking for Business

jim wilde — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 11:32:58 +0000

There are clear signs that momentum is building for an enterprise implementation of social networks as tools to improve internal communication and to deepen customer relationships. Managers might consider Drupal for the job.

"The growing number of companies offering private-label social network solutions, as well as IBM's recent entry into the field with its Lotus Connections social software platform for business, is a sure sign of increased demand. Other companies, like LinkedIn and Ryze, have social networking at the core of product offerings that generate revenue by bringing offline business networking practices into the online world. And corporations are continuing to incorporate advertising on affinity networks in their campaigns to reach highly targeted audiences with measurable response rates. Social commerce is also catching on - think about Amazon. We can all learns from them on improving sales.

Head up - we use Drupal, an open source web application framework to make all kids of social apps.

Erica Driver, principal analyst at Forrester Research, agrees that enterprises are taking collaborative networking tools more seriously, particularly for purposes of internal communication. "Right now, social networking is being used primarily for knowledge management and expertise location within companies," she notes. "It can be an extension of the enterprise directory." A basic directory may have an employee's name, location, and job title, but an extended profile format that is the kernel of a social networking platform can allow employees to add details about competencies, project experience and past positions, and to blog and share bookmarks. This added detail can make harnessing the enterprise's internal knowledgebase easier and, with proper access controls, can be useful information for customers as well. Driver cautions, "You have to show the information in context, and selectively," depending on who is viewing the profile, but she adds that most of these tools have such access control embedded."

Networking Opportunities: Social Networking for Business - by Nancy Davis Kho, ITtoolbox

We work with business development managers setting upcorpoarte social networking systems and community software (demo) that incorporates many of the above ideas. Go try it out.

Tags:

collaboration

knowledge management

internal communications

productivity

expertise locator

staff finder

social commerce

Social Media:

Social Media Tools