Archive for the 'Social Networking' Tag

From comScore:

The study found that 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up 8.3 points from 22.5 percent one year ago. Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112 percent in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347-percent jump.

“Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web,” said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile. “Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile since mobile devices are at the center of how people communicate with their circle of friends, whether by phone, text, email, or, increasingly, accessing social networking sites via a mobile browser.”

All channels, all devices, baby.

• 30% of smartphone users accessed social networks via mobile browsers — this was up from 22.5% in 2009.
• Total social networking access via mobile browsers on all mobile phones rose to 11.1% — this was up from 6.5% in 2009. Most of this growth was in the uptick in smartphone usage.

How does MySpace survive if their mobile-centric audience uses their mobile site less?

From the Washington Post:

Tomek Kott is so stubborn about not joining his friends — in truth, nearly his entire generation — on any social networking site that his wife launched a mini-crusade against him. Exploiting a tactic surely befitting our times, she whipped up a Facebook group last year called “Tomek Kott Must Join Facebook.”

…

“I am old-school in the personal touch way,” said Tomek Kott, who lives in Silver Spring and has outsourced many of his digital communication duties to his wife, Anne. “All my friends from high school have also met my wife, and they’re friends with her; my wife ‘friended’ them or whatever it’s called.”

Kott and others like him are social networking refuseniks: people in their 20s or early 30s who have gone off the grid, eschewing the ecology of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and the like. In Washington, refuseniks are not exactly operating in isolated, Luddite worlds: One is in a dance company, another is a rapper/hip-hop singer, another is a Georgetown undergraduate. Kott grew up in Redmond, Wash., where his father is a software engineer for Microsoft.

…

The vast majority of their peers in the millennial generation are social networking pros: About 85 percent of all Internet users 18 to 34 visited Facebook, MySpace or Twitter in August, according to ComScore, a Reston-based Internet data research company. And about 84 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds check social networking sites at least once a week, according to a May study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

I find that 85 percent number to be extremely high. Whatever it is, I would think that there’s a few people out there that say they check the sites, but don’t really do because they want to be in the “in crowd.”

I’ve been playing a bit with a BuddyPress installation, the new social networking application for WordPress. It requires WordPress MU as the platform. I really like it — it’s like they say, the basic features of Facebook in a box, plus you get to add blogs and other functionality that some sites don’t have.

BuddyPress is an uber-set of WordPress Plugins that add a lot of structure and functionality to WordPress, but even with that, the installation isn’t as tough as you would think.

The pluses

• Social networking: You can add friends, create groups, create blogs — all the actions you would expect in any social network, including emails that will be sent out during particular actions. It’s all open source too, so you have complete access to the code base to customize it, and believe me, you can customize WordPress a lot.
  
• Customizable profiles: While there’s some wonkyness to adding fields to profiles (you can’t order them), adding them is a snap. I have no idea how you would actually search the fields in an advanced search sort of way — looking at the database, it didn’t appear to be very easy — but the amount of customization you can do and the easy of use to do it is ridculous.
• WordPress Plug Ins: You get full access to the thousands of plug ins that have been developed for WordPress, including the BBPress discussion forum, which plugs right in the to the groups.
• Your server, you own it: While Ning is a great solution (I’ve seen some awesome implementations) at the end of the day if you’re a business, it’s best to have it on your box so you are less suspectible to the platform. BuddyPress is that.

The minuses

• Installation: It’s on WordPress MU, so moving it over from your standard WordPress installation isn’t as easy as you would hope (well, it’s not for the normal WordPress user). There was some database installation funkiness that a few extra minutes in PHP would have solved in handling errors better. Outside of having to delete the WordPress configuation file a few times, the installation was fairly run of the mill.
• Designing The UI: With the extra funcitonality comes the extra overhead of designing a look and feel for the application. While the first theme is great — I used some of the examples to solve design issues with a marketing directory I’m working on — there is a significant amount of work that has to be done that’s well outside of the “well, it’s WordPress, I can pay only $500 to design in” comments by clients. It is Facebook in a box, and should be treated as such for complexity, and I can imagine spending a month at least designing a decent social netowkr.
• WordPress Plug Ins: Not all of them will work well with WordPress MU, so the predictability of what works and what doesn’t is trial and error. You’re going to have to live with the caution of “well, this may work, but it will be an adventure” on some of the plug ins.
• Performance: It seemed a bit sluggish, and if you are running a social network of any size, I recommend having it on a dedicated server. Some of the plug ins haven’t been tuned yet, so there is a lag. Remember, it’s version 1.0.

Now, I’m not under 30, thank god, but this article came across the RSS wire. The original review was written by Richard Bernstein, a New York Times book critic and columnist at the International Herald Tribune. The article in question was about Mark Bauerlein’s new book, “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30).”

I’m going to add my opinion under each snippet.

“The great thing about the Internet is that it gives everybody an opinion and a venue to express it,” Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta, said in a recent phone conversation. “The bad thing about it is that it gives a venue to everybody with an opinion.

“But one of the signs of maturity is to realize that 99 percent of the stuff that happens to you every day has absolutely no significance to anybody else.”

Sure. But these are conversations I have every day with my friends, my parents. At least they are polite enough to just nod their heads and agree.

There are statistics to point to in this regard. A survey by the National School Boards Association indicates a very large number of students spending around nine hours a week doing computerized social networking and another 10 hours watching television. Other surveys show a majority of high school students doing an hour or less of written homework a day.

There are lies, more lies, and damn statistics. I watch much less television than my parents. How come no one reports on that?

That’s a school problem. If the teachers aren’t giving out enough homework, then something’s wrong with the system. For that matter, there’s always been uneducated masses, and somehow there’s this assumption that everyone should be able to write like Nathaniel Hawthorne. That’s entirely not something I’m not interested in on any medium.

And then there’s Facebook and the other social networking devices that were created for young people – specifically at college campuses as a way for new students to be introduced to their communities – and have been adopted by older ones to do exactly what their children spend too much time doing.

Language changes. People’s habits change. Networking changes.

Just because older people adopt it doesn’t make it bad: it just means the product management group of that site understands target audiences.

Some of us use the Facebooks, LinkedIns and MySpaces of the world for more than just reporting, “I think I’m going to eat corn flakes this morning” (which is close to the message I had for my activities for the day). It’s a way of connecting in the crazy world with some of our friends that is both professional and personal.

Social Networking has been around for as long as there were two people on this Earth, and just because the form is different doesn’t make it any less important.

It’s really up to us to take the tools of the day and teach our children how to use them more effectively. Right?

What would you do for a whopper? This is a great application for Facebook and website that creates some fun in exchange for free food. I don’t know if it will result in extra sales, but this is exactly a fun way to attach a reward component to social networking.

And, it’s been very successful from an awareness standpoint (Other posts at The Future of Ads, Inside Facebook). What do you think?

Great news!

Usability Counts is a blog partner for the Open Web Awards, a competition that spotlights sites that encourage openness of the technology and/or social aspect with their users, and Open Web Awards is the only multilingual international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology. Through an online nominating and voting process, the Open Web Awards recognizes and honors the top achievements in 26 categories.

(I stole some of the text from them).

This is the second time around for the Open Web Awards. All you have to do is visit our website and submit a nomination through that big blue sidebar item on the right. Nominations will be open through November 16th, 2008.

One of the joys of the Interwebs is that we can measure everything, from page views to visitors to purchases. It’s not as exact as some of the “experts” say it is (what really is a visitor, anyways, and are cookies really that reliable?), measuring the impact of social media and consequently attaching dollars to it has been a tricky proposition.

How do you measure the impact of a blinking, ugly MySpace page with 38 ads, 23,143 friends, and photos of themselves using a cell phone and a mirror? Is advertising effective there?

Webwalker, a blog in Canada (that explains it!) has come up with a first cut metrics list for social media. They linked off to this white paper about social media, which is a great read.

1. Generate awareness.
2. Drive Trial.
3. Product Launch.
4. Establish Need/Want
5. Product/Service Comparison.
6. Positive Association.
7. Form/Change Opinion.
8. Influence the Influencers.
9. Drive Action/Traffic.
10. Establish/Regain Trust. 

It’s a bit rough, I don’t totally agree with some of the classifications, and maybe this be condensed a bit, but it’s a start in the right direction. Comments?

I don’t really much like Starbucks: I think there are too many of them, and I usually get sick off of their coffee drinks. However, I think My Starbucks Idea is a phenomenal implementation of an social voting and networking, Digg-like — using your customers to generate ideas on how to your company.

You can submit ideas, and other users can vote and comment on the ideas. From that, the ideas are submitted to Starbucks management. On the blog, the management actually asks for feedback on how to implement the idea, and if the idea is good and gets a great rating, the management gives credit to the users (what they should be doing is sending them at least a Starbucks for some kind of reward system).

More importantly, it allows Starbucks to evangelize to their customers, and build a devout customer base. There’s nothing better than empowering your customers to do your advertising for you.

Some of the suggested ideas are better recycling options, healthier food suggestions, and how to get people to refill their starbucks cards to save the environment.

Microsoft is testing a prototype of a social network built on SharePoint, and again, it won’t be the first. We’ve done a few (Paul Mitchell Connect, a few companies I can’t name of I’d have to shoot you ;) ), and SharePoint’s governance model lends itself very well to maintain such a network. Some of the issues of legality and privacy are actually limited within a corporate social network.

Looking forward to more companies going social!

One of the things we’ve been doing at the day job has been turning SharePoint on its head and using it for social networking capabilities. I know it’s one of those catchphrases that are popular now, but in our implementations, it’s done very, very well (and scaled well) in those environments. The Official Blog of the SharePoint Product Group has a great article and links to a white paper that talks about the use of knowledge within an organization.

With some of our clients, we’ve been talking to them about using SharePoint as the source of truth and establishing governance as part of that, and really analyzing their culture.

Just put it this way — MOSS isn’t just about intranets.