Says Ask President Scott Garrell, "Searches for coupons on Ask.com have shot up almost 50% in 2009. With the holidays approaching, we know this service will help us make an impact with our users."

In early August, ReadWriteWeb covered Yahoo's recent Deals launch. Similar to Yahoo Deals, Ask Deals aggregates coupons and sales in a separate and easy-to-use shopping channel. However, when it comes to search, Yahoo redirects users to the Yahoo Deals page while Ask blends deals directly into standard results. In an effort to save consumers time, Ask also attempts to link directly to coupons and savings that are listed up front. For example, when you search for clothing, deals are listed from best to worst in terms of percentage of discount. From here users can share deals via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Delicious and Digg.

Sale news is available to members via the website, email and the Ask Deals Twittter account. Users can also install the Ask Deals homepage skin to see the featured "Deals of the Day". To install the skin visit Ask.com/skins.

True, Twitter traffic has gone through the roof. True, Twitter is the new killer app, the new cool kid on the block. And yes, even Oprah now loves Twitter. But does this mean Facebook should be worried? Well, maybe yes, but likely no, because Twitter and Facebook are two very different services.

It is always hard not to be the cool one anymore. Whether you're a movie star or an NBA player, going from #1 to #2 is hard. It is even harder not to be near the top at all. Aging is pretty hard and something we all have to deal with. But change is inevitable, part of the cycle of life. The new comes in and replaces the old.

The history of the software industry is a classic illustration of this kind of transition. IBM was replaced by Microsoft, which reigned for decades. Its strong grip was taken over by Google, and for a while Google was cool. With the rise of the social web, things have changed again. MySpace, Facebook, and now Twitter are taking over in people's minds as the newest, coolest kids on the block.

But IBM is still around and doing well. So is Microsoft, which now looks more like IBM. And, of course, Google, despite not being so cool anymore, is still king of the web. Not so cool, perhaps, but certainly very solid and with enviable revenue.

So maybe Facebook should not feel the need to be so cool and look like Twitter.

Why Did Facebook Take Off to Begin With?

Facebook emerged out of Harvard and was initially a network for college students. It started out as a simple way to keep in touch, to see what was going on around campus. By the time its doors opened to everyone, Facebook had a few things going for it:

- Unlike MySpace, it had clean and elegant profiles.
- It made sharing pictures easy.
- It made sending private messages to friends easy.
- It made posting public messages on walls easy.

In short, Facebook solved basic problems of communication between friends. And it solved them very well.

But it felt compelled to continue evolving. Perhaps it felt threatened by Google's foray into the social space. Perhaps it was enticed by the prospect of being bigger than Google. Or perhaps it was the $15 billion valuation offered by Microsoft that set the bar too high. Whatever it was, it kept rolling out features, including the Facebook platform and Beacon, which aimed to make the web revolve around it.

Facebook blew past MySpace and managed to keep Google at bay. It firmly won the race for the social web. But now it has begun a brand new race, this one against Twitter.

Twitter and Facebook Are Just Different

The thing is, though, this race makes no sense. Facebook and Twitter are simply two different services that need to co-exist on today's web. The only thing they have in common is that their users have a limited number of hours in the day in which to socialize.

At its core, Facebook is about closed sharing between a group of friends. That is why my sister, one of Facebook's first users, felt so compelled to use it, not because of apps or Beacon or tabs within tabs within tabs. It was simply about photos and messages on walls between friends.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter has not added new features. It has stuck to its core product: connecting people via short messages. And unlike Facebook, Twitter has allowed uni-directional connections: if you want to follow someone without him or her following you, you can. Twitter was never about sharing between friends in the first place, but rather about sharing news. And if you look at Twitter today, it has clearly changed the way the world consumes news.

So, Facebook is chasing a rival that is playing, in Gartner-speak, in a different Magic Quadrant. And that does not make sense because even if it refocuses on streams, Facebook at its core is about friends, not news. Even if it had public pages for celebrities that everyone could follow, Facebook would still not be about news. It's just different.

Focus on What You Do Best

Chasing Twitter could be costly. Facebook likely won't overtake Twitter and what it has built up today. Twitter has won that race already. But if Facebook continues to spend too much time trying to re-position itself, its core business (i.e. connecting friends) is in danger of becoming vulnerable.

Clearly, MySpace, with its brand new management, is not wasting time. AOL is cooking up some interesting new stuff itself in the social networking space. And Google may just decide to make Chrome more social than other browsers.

So, it seems that Facebook's best path to preserving its strength is to not waste energy chasing Twitter. Instead, it should return to its roots and core strength: being the #1 social networking site that makes it easy to network with your friends.

Sometimes it feels like social media is just not relevant to the people you're trying to reach. That's a common dilemma, but we believe it doesn't have to be that way. In this post we discuss five strategies for using social media to reach people who don't use social media, and we've listed specific tools you can use to do it.

All of the strategies and tools below are most effective when they're used well - it's easier said than done.

Develop Relationships with People Who Bridge The Gap Inside Other Organizations

You may want to target senior executives, older people or others who just aren't very likely to read your blog posts, Twitter messages, etc. but chances are - those people have co-workers, family and others in their lives who would. By adding value to the lives of less senior people inside organizations, you can gain mind-share with the people in whose interest it is to make good recommendations to their superiors at work.

Similarly, many mainstream journalists now participate in social media conversations for their research. Making yourself known as a topical expert to them online can help increase your visibility when it's time to write a story off-line.

Here's a recommendation we offered to one non-profit organization that we often use as an example now for others.

Let's say you work locally on a particular issue and you're interested in getting traditional press coverage. One way to pursue this is to subscribe to a feed for national media outlets, filter that feed for keywords related to your topic of interest and keep your eye out for breaking news or important topics on the national level. You might even set up an RSS to SMS alert.

Then, when a story comes out in the New York Times about water quality, food transport costs, or whatever your issue of interest is, you can contact local press about it and say "I don't know if you've seen this national coverage on this topic [they probably haven't because you've automated watching for it] but if you're interested in a local angle, our Executive Director/CEO/[or insert more down to earth person] is a good expert source for a local perspective."

You don't want to do that too often, but occasional and appropriate use of this tactic should be appreciated by the press you reach out to. It's mutually beneficial for both parties and could help you get that coverage in traditional media that's more likely to be read by your off-line target market. Even the smallest organization could grow its mind-share in mainstream markets quickly using tactics like this.

Tools to use for these tactics: For general participation and visibility among the social media users that do exist in your area of interest, check out Twellow.com for a directory of Twitter users by industry, do some searches on FriendFeed.com and find out what the top blogs in your area of interest are using the methods described in our post "Six Ways to Find Top Blogs in Any Niche." Just participating with like minded people in this space will move you up on their list for biz dev and marketing.

If you're not familiar with RSS feeds, start with this introduction: RSS in Plain English. FeedRinse.com is one of the easiest to use feed filtering services. Feed filtering is also available inside Zaptxt.com, one of our favorite RSS to IM/Email alert systems. See also Pingie, a new alert service we've been using and Alerts.com, an even newer one we wrote about this week.

Use Web 2.0 Tools to Learn About Real Life Public Events

There may or may not be relevant events in your field that are attended by non-social media users and are listed on sites like Upcoming.org and Eventful.com. It's worth a look and worth subscribing to the RSS feeds for those searches.

More likely, perhaps, is that your local newspaper's website has those kinds of events listings. Trade associations, nonprofit groups and other kinds of sites often have events listings as well. What has this got to do with social media tools? You can subscribe in the same RSS feed reader that you read blogs in to those event listings. All too often there aren't feeds available, but there are tools you can use to create them (see below).

Tools to use for this tactic: An RSS reader, be it Google Reader, iGoogle, MyYahoo or another - there are lots of options. If events listings aren't being published by RSS, here's what you can do. Find pages where they are listed, scrape a feed using Dapper.net (see how to do this) then filter the feed for keywords related to your industry if need be using a tool like FeedRinse.com or Pipes.Yahoo.com if you feel brave. (Want a 5 minute screencast intro to the basics of using Yahoo Pipes? Well there you go.)

For example, I just scraped a feed from my local paper's news site event listings, then ran that feed through Yahoo Pipes to filter for tech or startup related events. The end result? A feed that's empty today but could deliver just what I'm looking for later - mainstream events that I can attend after having learned about them using new tools on the web.



Make Your Blog an Email Newsletter and Promote it Elsewhere

Feedburner, Google's RSS publishing service, makes it easy to offer any RSS feed, including the one your blog should publish automatically, as an email newsletter. There are lots of companies that buy AdSense links on Google for links to their websites and blogs for key search terms. Your marketing department may write guest editorials in traditional press already and any other traditional marketing campaign can lead people to an "email newsletter" page - really your blog with email subscription.

If your target audience doesn't read blogs or participate in social networks, they probably do like email. This is an easy thing to do and can prove quite effective for non-technical audiences if framed in a non-threatening way.

Look Harder, Your Audience Probably is Using Social Media That You Aren't Aware Of

There were 5 billion videos watched on YouTube just by people in the US in July. There are people in your industry using LInkedIn, we guarantee it. Where are people talking about you or your industry online? Check out Kingsley Joseph's Social Media Firehose to find examples (click the "list" button to see a list view of links).

A couple of other places to look include Ask.com's blogsearch, sort by popularity, and the social bookmarking site Delicious, where you can search for and subscribe to the most popular or most recent bookmarked links by keyword. You'll want to use the site in different ways depending on your field. http://delicious.com/popular/chiropractic may not unearth a lot of resources, but http://delicious.com/tag/chiropractic+blog looks pretty interesting, for example.




It is not surprising to find an equine dental assistant on LinkedIn.




Use the Internet to Make Yourself Smarter In Real Life

The best way to use social media to reach people who don't use social media is probably just to use social media to kick more ass. You may be the only person in a meeting that reads blogs (unlikely, really) but that doesn't have to be what people notice; the fact that you know more, sooner, about your shared interests (as a result of reading blogs) well will be a big help.

Easier said than done? Check out our recommended tools in this regard:
Check out our article about how to find the top blogs in any niche and then combine those sources with the methodology describe in our post How to Find the Weirdest Stuff on the Internet (or the best content on any topic).

We also recommend taking those top sources you identify and turning them into a Google Custom Search Engine, which is remarkably easy for even the least technical people to do. Search against those top sources as reference and you'll unearth all kinds of useful knowledge from the archives of your industries online experts.

Build your reading list with the tools described in those posts above and you'll be using social media to advance your career and connect more effectively with more non-users of social media.

We Think it Can Be Done!

Participation in these technologies is expanding rapidly, but a huge portion of the world is still not likely to read this blog post, for example (their loss!) much less to connect with the kinds of communication we all share on a daily basis.

How do these strategies look to you? We'd love to know what methods and tools you've found particularly useful in using social media to reaching outside of the echo chamber. Let us know in comments.

Image at top: "Nuke!" CC from Flickr user Jaako





]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/five_ways_to_use_social_media.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/five_ways_to_use_social_media.php Analysis / Strategy Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:36:08 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick For every 1000 people who read a tech blog post, there may be one that leaves a comment. Lurking in the crowd are any number of people who work for companies related to the subject of the post. They almost never comment, and when they do they often come across as obnoxious, self-promoting and spammy. It doesn't have to be that way, though.
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]]> There are a number of ways that you can join in a conversation online, even though you have economic interests in it. You who work in the various sectors we cover often know far more about the products, people and trends at issue than we who cover a relatively broad beat do. We like it when you leave good and useful comments. What do those look like?

Being transparent about who you are and what your interests are is fundamental, but beyond that there are a variety of ways you can add value instead of being an annoyance. Below, we discuss five of those ways; we hope you'll add thoughts of your own about how to comment appropriately - unless you work for one of the comment hosting companies, of course (just kidding!).

The Fundamental Mood of a Good Comment

Bad comments from companies are loud, self-centered, only semi-relevant and often have the tone of a spurned lover. Good comments from companies are super humble, gently engaged with competitors and focused on adding value to the discussion of the whole sector.

A Grey Area

One comment type that lives in a grey area is the "don't forget about us" comment. That's one of the most common types. It's annoying. This author at least welcomes emails like this because it's hard to remember all the relevant companies in any given sector. Leaving a "what about me?" comment publicly though just looks bad.

Here are five ways you can add more value than by just throwing your company's name and link into a blog post's comments. An example is provided for each strategy; these are decent examples, really great examples are still too rare, unfortunately. We know you're capable of really nailing it though and we don't want you to be afraid to try.

1. Update Us on New Developments

When we write about any company or service, one thing that we ought to make sure we do is consider where that company's competitors are in the market. We hope to compare feature sets, user growth and any number of other factors. That's easier said than done, though, so we welcome comments from competitors that provide us updates about where their service is at.

This is especially true when we're talking about a new technology that only a limited number of vendors have implemented support for. A good recent example can be found in the comments on our story about C-Shirt, the Creative Commons remixable t-shirts passed on by QR code and mobile phones. QR codes are common in Japan but are just starting to emerge in other places.

In a comment responding to that post, Eric from a semi-competitive company called SpringLeap complimented C-Shirt's integration of QR codes and Creative Commons, then pointed out that SpringLeap would soon be adding QR code support to their online clothing service too. QR codes are unusual enough that we were glad to learn about another company moving in that direction.

Feel free to comment about updates to your service that we may not be aware of when they aren't so rare, either. If you can focus on the update more than on the "me too" feel, then we'll appreciate you taking the time to broaden our knowledge of the field.

2. Clarify Your Product or Market Position

Never is it as obvious that top tech bloggers have limited knowledge about the things we write about than when we write about you or your company. Who knew we could be so wrong?

At those times, a good blogger will welcome your clarification. We may not have used your product enough to know about the big differences between it and other products it got thrown in a list with. We might have some real misconceptions about where the company stands in growth, history or target audience. Please, let us know in comments so we can be more informed next time we write about you or your sector in the future. This is a conversation!

When we wrote about the adoption rate of Microsoft Silverlight earlier this week, we said it could be picking up the pace compared to the adoption rate of Adobe Flash. We were (I was) wrong in our assessment of the situation. Adobe's John Dowdell jumped in to comments and put some numbers in perspective for us. He also offered some analytical perspective of his own, as someone deeply engaged in these issues. His comment wasn't particularly gentle, but that's ok - he works for Adobe and we were very wrong in the assertion he was commenting on.

3. Articulate Differentiation

You know your company and your competitors better than we do. Tech bloggers tend to know the nitty gritty about one or two niches that they personally engage with most closely, but we often write about far more than that. That's ok, but we could use your help, vendors, in fleshing out the details and differences between various service offerings. Our readers come to our sites to learn about what tools are available to solve particular problems. There is no way we could articulate the full breadth of options and the differences between them as well as we plus our commenting readers can.

As long as you don't stop at "me too," go on too long or talk only about yourselves - comments about differentiation are more than welcome.

When we wrote about hedge fund power research suite FirstRain in April, we mentioned another service called RivalMap. RivalMap's Kris Rasmussen jumped into comments and let us know his company's product was adding several of the features that FirstRain offers (foreshadowing yesterday's announcement of a partnership with Newsgator) but that the primary differentiation was a price margin of tens of thousands of dollars!

There are probably even better examples of company comments intended to articulate differentiation. One of the inspirations for this post was a comment left by Iterasi (disclosure: a consulting client) in a post about competitor LaterLoop over at WebWorkerDaily. Company blogger Alex Williams thanked WWD's Jason Harris for mentioning his company in a review of a competitor, praised the competitor's unique feature set, then articulated some fundamental differences between the companies that Harris didn't mention in his review and finally closed the comment with more appreciation for the competitor. That's a model example of a company adding value in a dignified way to a blog post about a competitor.

4. Talk Up the Other Team

Have you seen the blog posts on places like TechCrunch or GigaOm about one company announcing a round of funding or being acquired, where that company's competitors leave a nice short comment simply congratulating them on their good fortunes? Just a short congrats, signed by the name of a representative of a competitor, with their name linked via the URL field in comments to their company's site. That's classy. Don't throw your URL into the text of the comment or take that time to talk yourself up. Just offer a dignified congratulations and the unspoken message is that your niche is further validated, a rising tide lifting all boats. Don't act like you're drowning.

A different but good example of this kind of comment can be seen in our April post about the ongoing success of aggregator PopURLs. We wrote about PopURL's new sponsored collaboration with Intel.

Semi-related competitor DIYStartupNews.com left the following comment:

"This ia great idea and reminds me of techmemes sponsored news sources.

This is smart marketing move by intel, more companies should look at sponsored branding of sites like this. I should imagine they are getting a good return on their investment. "

Well, we bet you think it's a great idea, DIY, maybe you'd like a little of that kind of action yourself. Also, why enter your URL in the "name" field? Is that what your mother calls you? We'd love to get to know you as a person in this industry.

Criticism aside, that was a good comment - PopURLs did come up with a smart model that's reminiscent of another successful model, Techmeme's sponsored feeds. We hadn't thought of that comparison, otherwise we would have mentioned it. That was a useful celebration of PopURLs' success and a good comment to leave.

5. Add Humor or Insider Insights

People who eat, sleep and breathe wikis, video hosting or local review sites for example all have jokes, details and perspectives that those of us who simply use and occasionally write about such services just can't have. Leave some of that information in comments! We'll all feel smarter, we'll feel like ReadWriteWeb is the place to come for deep insider knowledge and everyone will appreciate you and your company for it!

When we wrote about the growing number of serious uses for wikis last month, Whit from Wiki.Answers.com jumped into comments and pointed out that Comscore called Wiki.Answers the fastest growing site of 2007. Touche! That was something that we suspect wiki-heads probably knew. (I've consulted for wiki companies and remember now that Wiki.Answers were mentioned as a big player.) As a non-specialist in the field of wikis, though, that's the kind of detail that I just didn't know. It was self promotional, and a link would have been nice, but it's an undeniably important detail in a general conversation about the growth of wikis.

An even better example of offering insider knowledge in comments can be found in a comment from this morning to our coverage of Japanese video site NicoDou. Jane from Akibanana.com, a news site that supports a company offering tours of a particular Japanese sub-culture, left an incredibly helpful comment that included two good links to sites other than hers, some updates on the topic of the post and other information that we simply didn't have the context to include in our original post. It was a fantastic comment and gave readers a great reason to click through the commenter's name to learn about the company she represents.

Conclusion

A lot of this is common sense, but some of it is particular to the emerging culture of the social media market. We're blessed at least in the US to have a very active social media economy - so lots of our readers here have jobs with companies related to the subjects of our writing. We want you to participate, you have so much you can add! It can be a great way for you to increase you visibility in the market, as well. See our post about the New Robert Scobles for a discussion about other ways this can be done.

If we saw half as many simple "don't forget about me!" comments and twice as many comments focused on humbly adding value to the conversation from the perspective of someone working at a related company - the quality of conversation in the tech blogosphere would be dramatically improved. We'd love to see that happen.

Are there other ways you've seen value added appropriately in comments by company representatives? We'd love to learn about more strategic options; spamminess is really annoying, learning together is fun and fulfilling.

Images via Flickr CC: "I Must Be Getting Old" by idogcow and "Welcome Hands" by dtcchc

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_comment_about_your_comp.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_comment_about_your_comp.php Analysis / Strategy Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:54:31 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Here at ReadWriteWeb we spend a lot of time reading the blogs of companies we write about (send yours to tips@readwriteweb.com) and we've found that some of them are just plain fun. An interesting company blog can be a great way to draw in new people through relevant content of general interest - and some of them will stay to check out the service you provide.

Some companies just blog about updates to their own technology and that's good for existing users to see. Others are fun to read whether you're a user or not. Here are some of the company blogs we recommend reading for a good time.

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You can't talk about interesting company blogs without mentioning Signal vs. Noise, the wildly successful blog about design, usability and small business from the makers of project management service Basecamp. This blog could easily stand on its own as compelling reading even if there wasn't a company behind it selling services. Sure enough, it's even got an ad on it from the elite boutique ad network The Deck. Signal vs. Noise has 88k subscribers - making it fun and educational for those subscribers is great for the business of 37signals.

Ning

Ning powers niche social networks and the company's blog is a great place to find out about all kinds of groups that are actively using this technology. Some of them a real surprise. The International Society of Space Entreprenuers, the Eat Local Foods Coalition of Maine and the ASPCA Book Club all have social networks! Who knew? Now how about some data portability, Ning? If you want to read about the theoretical side of niche social networks, check out data portability lovin' competitor PeopleAggregator's blog, written by the company's prolific CEO Marc Canter.

Viddler

Viddler is a crazy feature rich video hosting service with a very good blog. In addition to feature announcements, the company posts a wide variety of videos that are interesting to watch. That's where I discovered this one below, for example.


Newsgator

RSS company Newsgator has a great blog about RSS use cases, data portability debates and other industry topics. Maybe I'm just an RSS head - but I really enjoy their blogging. Newsgator competitor Attensa also has a very good blog about all things RSS - but it sure could use some more updates!

A.viary

Collaborative design tool A.viary has a couple of very good blogs. Their idea blog is full of interesting content that regularly hits the front page of digg. These folks have some seriously juvenile gender issues going on, which I have given them a hard time about before, but their blog is still fun to read otherwise. Every post they put up is worth a look.

Adaptive Path

User experience and design firm Adaptive Path publishes a very thought provoking blog. I usually scan company blogs for announcements and videos - but their longer posts often convince me to stop and read. OLPC: The Beauty of Failure and Greedy Mobile Interfaces? I'll stop and read posts with titles like that.

Amazon Web Services

What could be more dreary than commoditized data processing and storage services? While that might sound boring, the AWS Blog does a great job of highlighting cool things that are done on top of Amazon Web Services. Lately they've put up posts about how AWS are being used by the New York Times to provide online access to 150 years of archives and by the little ShareThis widget that you've probably seen on hundreds of thousands of blogs around the web. Lots of charts, graphs and other fun stuff for nerds on this blog.

Strands

Here at RWW we've been following the mega-funded recommendation service Strands for several years. We find what they do fascinating. Their company blog is mostly about company announcements, but they have really interesting announcements. Last.fm on Nokia phones? Cool! The most interesting section of their blog though is the data portability category and throughout the blog you'll find some really deep thoughts on cutting edge innovation.

Articulate

Articulate is a an e-learning tools company with a very popular blog. More than 20,000 subscribers actively discuss topics like how to make a good screencast and how best to work with clip art. This was a new one to me but I've already enjoyed spending some time on this company's blog. What more could you ask from a company blog? Good content creates a community of advocates that share the blog with friends, some of whom undoubtedly will purchase the company's products.

These Are But a Few

There really are a fair number of interesting company blogs around the web. We'd love to hear about some of your favorites. Others that are worth checking out include Oracle Apps Lab for a fun discussion of web 2.0 in the enterprise, the Lijit blog on "searching the social graph" and the many fun blogs published by Adobe.

If you found this post of interest, you might enjoy reading our coverage of some of the top new social media company evangelists as well.

We hope you find some of these blogs worth subscribing to and we'd love to learn about other blogs that cover topics of general interest that even non-customers would enjoy reading.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/good_company_blogs.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/good_company_blogs.php Analysis / Strategy Fri, 23 May 2008 11:40:01 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Yesterday, Microsoft issued a statement to publicly acknowledge that they hadn't lost interest in Yahoo!. Instead of a hostile takeover, Microsoft may be going after Yahoo from an entirely different angle and the industry is buzzing with exactly what angle Microsoft intends to pursue. Here's a look at the statements by Microsoft and Yahoo, and what industry leaders have to say.
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]]> Exploring Alternatives

Microsoft has issued a public statement that they will continue to explore alternatives. While Microsoft notes of possibly venturing to third parties, they haven't taken their eyes off of Yahoo! yet. Instead Microsoft intends to talk with Yahoo and explore alternative angles to their former strategy. With little to no reassurance that any transactions will result, Microsoft states that:

In light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business. Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo! an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo! Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo! at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo! or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft or with other third parties.

Yahoo!'s Response

To ensure that things would go over smoothly on Yahoo!'s end, Yahoo! also issued a public statement about the talks:

Yahoo! has confirmed with Microsoft that it is not interested in pursuing an acquisition of all of Yahoo! at this time. Yahoo! and its Board of Directors continue to consider a number of value maximizing strategic alternatives for Yahoo!, and we remain open to pursuing any transaction which is in the best interest of our stockholders. Yahoo!'s Board of Directors will evaluate each of our alternatives, including any Microsoft proposal, consistent with its fiduciary duties, with a focus on maximizing stockholder value.

What really stands out about this statement is the following line:
"[...] Microsoft that it is not interested in pursuing an acquisition of all of Yahoo! at this time."

Microsoft may no longer want all of Yahoo!, but Yahoo!'s search engine would be a very nice "alternative".

More Buzz

Leading industry experts are abuzz with news of what's really going on between Microsoft and Yahoo. Kara Swisher of Boomtown makes a note of an internal Microsoft memo with a strategy update from Kevin Johnson the president of the company's Platforms & Services division. The memo gives a little more insight into Microsoft's strategy for Yahoo, concluding that they can compete.

John Furrier the Founder and recent CEO of PodTech Network released even more interesting news today. While it's only a rumor thus far, Furrier says this:

My sources say that the Yahoo and Microsoft teams are bunkered down in a Palo Alto hotel hammering out the final stages of a transaction that will have Microsoft picking up the Yahoo search business. Word is that this deal will be done this week. While this is not surprising, it does bring to question the motives and plans of Microsoft.

Furrier also identifies why Microsoft would go through all the twists and turns to accomplish this. According to Furrier, with a failed bid for over $40 billion, Microsoft intends to buy the search business from Yahoo and move on to Facebook with a $20 million bid. "Integrating the search team at Yahoo with Facebook puts a formidable army to take on Google." Scoble seems to be taking a similar stance and even goes as far as stating how the situation explains Facebook's hostile behavior towards Google this past week.

War of the Worlds Part II

Is one of the biggest showdowns in tech history about to play out between Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook. Can Google continue to lead the search industry with the best of Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook fighting against them? While, this remains to be seen, we fully intend to keep you posted as the story unfolds.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/msyahoo.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/msyahoo.php Analysis / Strategy Mon, 19 May 2008 06:41:30 -0800 Corvida Google announced this morning that YouTube's new Insight video viewer analytics now includes free demographic stats on any video's viewers. YouTube users who have included gender in their user profiles can be anonymously reported and providing your age is a requirement to open an account with YouTube.

It's interesting to know that my latest video about late night escapades was viewed primarily by men ages 30 to 50. In a few minutes I will embed in this post a video of myself eating a live baby chicken and will report back on viewer demographics when they become available. You can view the demographics on your videos by clicking the "insight" button next to each video on your account view.

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Geographic location is also reported as part of the Insight package. Statistics can be limited to any time frame and are viewable side by side with metrics on a video's relative popularity and leading sources of off-site inbound traffic. It's a great little metrics package.

Presumably YouTube isn't getting all Facebook Beacon on us and tracking the demographics of users logged into YouTube but viewing videos embedded around the web. That would be a positive thing to see in anonymous aggregate. Since such views are unlikely to be counted, perhaps I should spare the fluffy little baby chick. Oh what the heck, let's give it a try.

These kinds of statistics were presumably available for advertisers, in large quantities, since the dawn of YouTube. Breaking them out on a video by video basis and offering a nice interface is a very logical next step but one that too few services online would take the time to provide - much less for free.

It would be nice if users were given the option to publicly expose their video Insight statistics and could view them on a chanel-wide basis instead of just for a single video. Update! I was wrong, several readers pointed out that YouTube does offer aggregate demographics of all your videos! Thanks, friends!

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/youtube_demographics.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/youtube_demographics.php Analysis / Strategy Thu, 15 May 2008 09:56:32 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick The number of people whose work is touched by the internet these days is hard to imagine. Many of us have been working full-time online for a while, but for the vast majority of people online today that's not the case. Here at RWW we communicate with people with a wide range of experience working online every day.

We've noticed that many people don't use some tools that would make their lives online much more effective and efficient. Here's our list of some tools we'd suggest are essential. Several of these tools will deliver huge value to your workday and take less than 10 minutes to get set up. Some will be obvious to full time web workers, but some suggestions may not be. They include: a multi-service IM client, cross platform screensharing tool, a custom search engine, a startpage and a blog with contact info.

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]]> Multi-service IM

Many people only have an active account with one IM service, often AIM or Yahoo! Messenger. It's nice to not be that person when you want to have an IM conversation. There are a number of applications that will sign you in to accounts on all the major IM platforms every time you open the app. Everything can be made easier with IM, especially phone calls where URLs can be shot back and forth with ease.

By using a cross-service IM client, you'll never have to miss out on an IM conversation with someone else who only has an account on one service.

The first step is to take a few minutes to set up IM accounts on AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger and GMail.

Then, get an IM client that will log you into all of those accounts at once. If you're on a Mac check out Adium, on Windows try Miranda. Once you take a few minutes to get this set up, you'll never go back.

Cross Platform Screensharing Tool

WebEx is like Kleenex (a brand name, that is) but it's not the only option for screensharing. Older Macs have a hard time using it. It's really clunky and people who pay for it say it's expensive. None the less, it's really nice to be able to let someone view your screen for a real-time demonstration.

The Mac to Mac screen sharing that iChat offers is really nice, easy and powerful. For the rest of the world though, there's a variety of options. I've been using Yugma lately and it works well for Mac to Windows sharing. Many people really like Yuuguu. What are your favorite tools for this? Whenever I'm looking for a popular way to do almost anything, I start by looking at a URL like http://del.icio.us/popular/screensharing.

A Custom Search Engine

Google Custom Search Engine lets you paste in a list of URLs and create a "miniature search engine" that brings back results only from those URLs you've selected. I use these all day long, every day. The next time you think "Damn, Marshall sure took some time to research details on this post" - you can know now that it was really just my Custom Search Engines at work.

Here's how you do it. Select some key news and reference sites in your field and set up a CSE for them, drop a link to it in your toolbar and use it whenever you can remember to. It's like an all-natural brain augmentation. My best personal custom search engines are closely guarded resources but try out some of these that we've posted here at RWW and imagine the possibilities. Check out our Mac Rumor Blogs CSE, US Government Watchdog Organization CSE and our very useful CSE of 100 Productivity Sites. You may not work in any of these fields, but ask yourself what the key reference and news sites are in your field and throw them in a CSE. It's super easy.

Is it a stretch to call a CSE essential? Use one for awhile and I think you'll agree that they really can become a key part of your use of the internet. The ROI of employing this tool is higher than almost anything else on the internet, honestly. I can't think of any knowledge worker, in any field, that wouldn't benefit greatly from a well-constructed Custom Search Engine. You can probably make one for yourself in less than 10 minutes.

Startpage

Every place I work I set up an RSS startpage for myself and my co-workers. Consulting clients, non-profits, anybody I can get my hands on gets a startpage before I'm done with them. I usually use Netvibes just because it's easy to share pages, the OPML handling is pretty good and the mobile version is great. The new Ginger version breaks sharing for some people, though.

I put the highest priority RSS feeds that I subscribe to on that startpage, then put a link to it on my browser toolbar. I click on that maybe once an hour and see if these top sources have anything new. It's quick and easy, much easier than opening up a whole feed reader.



What works well on a startpage? Depending on your job, some things are more important than others to be updated on frequently. Here's what I put on startpages:
Top blogs in your niche
Vendor blogs, press releases
search feeds
* ask.com for blogs, yahoo and/or topix for news, live.com for web if you like, Summize.com for twitter
* try searching for your org name, link to your site, top exec names, competitors names, key terms?

Blog With Your Name and Contact Info

This might seem silly, but everyone should have a blog of some sort. A dynamic web presence with biographical and contact information on it. A search engine-friendly place to let the world know what you're interested in and how to get in touch with you. That's not crazy, it's a real good idea.

Blogging can take more time and energy than most people are willing to expend. How about using Tumblr or putting FriendFeed on a page with your contact info? (Like Robert Scoble does.) However you can get timely, pertinent content up on the web next to your name - you should do it. It's a great way to demonstrate your engagement with your field and your intelligence. If done well, that's far better than most resumes. It also provides great context for people who are just starting to interact with you.

I put my phone number on my personal blog, and I write for the 11th most linked to blog on the web. I get maybe 3 unwanted phone calls a week as a result. That means that just about anyone else should be able to put their phone number and IM on their blogs as well. It's so convenient to be able to get a hold of people in a hurry. When an opportunity arises, do you want to be easy to reach or do you want that opportunity to be taken by someone else who is? Undoubtedly this is a calculation that's clearer for people less subject to harassment based on gender or race, but except in complicating circumstances your personal contact info should be available online if at all possible. Bad things are unlikely to happen.

Conclusion

Those are some of the tools we find most important to use, and that we wish more people we interacted with used. The difference between working with powerful tools and working without them is huge. What would you add to or subtract from this list?

Tools photo by Flickr user geishaboy500. Thanks for using Creative Commons licenses!

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/five_tools_everyone_working_on.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/five_tools_everyone_working_on.php Analysis / Strategy Fri, 09 May 2008 16:49:36 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Connecticut software developer Jake Luciani has run 10k items on Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and Mixx through the API of popularity ranking engine AideRSS to analyze the connection between popularity and timing. He determined the best days and times for a blog post to be submitted to those sites if its author wants it to receive the maximum number of votes, comments and inbound links.

Luciani's conclusion: between 1pm and 3pm PST (after lunch) or between 5pm and 7pm PST (after work) are the best times and Thursday is the best day. The worst time to post? Between 3 and 5 PM PST on the weekends - nobody cares. See the graphs below.

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]]> How the Measurement Works

In the graphs below the factor measured is what AideRSS calls a PostRank of 6 or higher. AideRSS looks at all the items in an RSS feed and scores them (relative only to other items in the same feed) in terms of number of comments, number of Diggs, number of times saved to Del.icio.us and number of inbound links from blogs. The highest percentile of posts in a feed have PostRanks closest to 10.

These graphs then measure which times and days see the largest numbers of posts submitted that end up being more popular than other posts in the same feed. So the most wildly popular and discussed items among all popular items at Digg, etc. It's tracking the time that the post is submitted to the news site - not when it was necessarily posted on the blog. It's a touch obtuse and it would be nice to read a little more about the methodology employed - but the PostRank algorithm is relatively transparent and the conclusions are intuitive.

This is just one of many things we've written about using AideRSS for here at RWW. It's a simple and very powerful tool that I at least use every single day.

Note that of course people blog for more reasons than just popularity and popularity cannot be equated with popularity! If you're in a hurry it is one way to look for quality, though. :)

With no further ado, knock yourself out wrapping your mind around these graphs. I almost did; remember that times here are GMT and if you're on the West Coast of the US, I hope you just had a nice lunch and remember to subtract 7 hours from this 24 hour clock to figure out these times for yourself.

Thanks for the creative and valuable work, Jake!



For more RSS fun times, check out the other entries on the AideRSS blog.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_study_shows_best_and_worst.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_study_shows_best_and_worst.php Analysis / Strategy Fri, 02 May 2008 12:00:31 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick What's more stereotypically trivial than shoe shopping? Using Twitter, of course! Online shoe retailer Zappos does shoes and social media remarkably well. Scores of bloggers, lots of video blogging and 198 employees on Twitter help keep the company's profile high and humanize the folks behind the shoe sales.

Of all the different types of social media the company uses, none are as interesting as its use of Twitter. Twitter may sound cliche, but it's not just about Twitter as one single service. Twitter is symbolic of rapid, short, synchronous and public conversations. Zappos has bitten off a big chunk of that paradigm.

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]]> Zappos on Twitter

The most remarkable of all the social media efforts underway at Zappos is the company's use of Twitter. Zappos has a dedicated page for Twitter on its site that's linked to from every other page on the site with the words What are Zappos employees doing right now?

There you'll find all 198 of the Twittering Zappos employees' most recent messages. Employees tweet about what they are doing at work and about interesting resources on and off the Zappos site.

Traditional Concerns

It's a daring step for a brand to take; you never know when someone is going to post a message like "I <3 clubbing baby seals. =) " on your company website. Zappos employees also drink a lot, but always in moderation - a Tweetscan search finds that no one inside or outside the company has ever tweeted the words Zappos and "drunk" in the same message! I'd have thought excessive drinking would lead to shoe loss and thus replacement but apparently the company is taking a longer-term approach to its social media strategy.

Instead, the aggregation site highlights words throughout the page that link back to search results pages in the Zappos catalog. Could this really drive sales? Conceivably, I suppose.

Leadership, Twitter Style

There's also an employee leaderboard that shows who's on Twitter and how many followers they have. Tony the CEO has five times as many followers as anyone else, perhaps because there's a link on every page encouraging people to follow him and perhaps because CEOs are always the most interesting people at any company (sarcasm). Notably, Tony has taken the time to follow even more people than are following him - he's got 2800+ followers and 3200+ friends.

Tony's also penned a prominently placed introduction to using Twitter. Check out the intro paragraph:

Remember back when sending SMS text messages on your cell phone was a new thing, and it seemed kind of strange to use your cell phone to do that? And today, you probably wonder how you ever lived without text messaging.

Well, Twitter is the same way. It's going to seem a little weird at first, but I promise you if you can talk your friends into joining it and you all use it for 2 weeks, it will change your life. You will wonder how you ever lived without it.

Talk about drinking the kool-aid! The introduction is actually one of the most accessible introductions to Twitter I've seen and something that anyone interested in getting started could learn from.

Transparent Brand Tracking

Additionally, there's a page that aggregates all the public mentions of Zappos from Twitter users at large. This is a great example of openness and transparency - something the company would probably be less inclined to do had they not already developed a wildly loyal customer base thanks to their famous customer service.

Who wouldn't like to have messages like this on their website, though, without exercising any control over what appears there?



Now if there were shoe factory employees in China or Indonesia tweeting in English about their working conditions making shoes that will be sold on Zappos ("carpal tunnel for dollars an hour pays rent on hovel-like family dorm in company compound. damn these shoes. pic: tinyurl.com/...") - that might not be so desirable. Luckily for the brand, like people say - Twitter isn't mainstream yet.

Celebrating Your Super Fans

Finally, Zappos has set up special Twitter tracking pages for some of its favorite outside fans. Check out this page for the super charming WineLibrary.TV founder Gary Vaynerchuk, and this page for author and social media consultant Tara Hunt. That's a great little way to say thanks to Twitter savvy brand super fans.

There are lots of companies using Twitter these days. Not because it's a reaching a mass audience but because it's reaching an early-adopter, tech-savvy, presumed-influencer audience. We wrote about many others last month in a post about customer service via Twitter. If the spammiest business Twitter users are on one end of the spectrum, that's the heavy side, unfortunately. The air is clearer and the examples are sparser on the high end of the Twitter engagement spectrum. Zappos is a great model for other companies seeking to get engaged.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zappos_twitter.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zappos_twitter.php Analysis / Strategy Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:08:27 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Here at ReadWriteWeb we get piles and piles of pitches for coverage from companies all day long and they almost always come in by email. You'll notice that only a tiny percentage of those pitches result in write-ups here. How can you increase your chances of getting written about here or on other tech blogs? In this post we'll discuss five ways that companies often try and fail to get our attention and one way that almost always works.
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]]> That rarest of methods, maddeningly, is actually the best way by far. We hope that readers interested in getting written about will take these thoughts into consideration. We want to write about companies and projects, we really do. We'll start this discussion, though, with what doesn't work well for us.

Wrong: Email the wrong email address

Richard MacManus started this blog on April 20, 2003 - that means this weekend will be the site's 5th birthday! Richard has worked very hard to grow the blog to now include a staff of writers (hold your applause, please!) but he's worked so hard that you really ought not impose the extra work on him of forwarding your tips to tips@readwriteweb.com. That's where you should send email in the first place, if you're going to at all. Don't send general pitches to him, to me, to Josh or to Sarah. Send them to tips@readwriteweb.com. That's right, if you send your email to tips@readwriteweb.com then we'll all see it. We'll all appreciate you for it too, because all to often that's not how people do it, despite our many pleas.

We get a lot of email, though, and I know I'm usually scanning the inbox looking for direct, personal communication with subject lines like "here's the money I owe you" or "this is your Mother, why haven't you called all week?" We do try to at least scan all your pitch emails, but really - that's not enough.

Embargoed news should still come in three or four days in advance ideally - by email, to tips@readwriteweb.com, but you can communicate far more with us as described below.

Wrong: Phone Calls

Some of us get a lot of phone calls, especially from PR agents. Some of us (Richard) live in New Zealand and don't have to deal with that. I personally don't mind an occasional phone call if it's about something really interesting or from someone I know to have good taste in tips. Sarah hates the telephone and does not want you to call her on it. Josh says phone calls have been driving him "batty" - especially in this week leading up to the Web 2.0 Expo.

We get a fair amount of phone calls from people pitching products that do not fit our readers' interests or that just aren't that interesting. You think your news is interesting (or, more likely, your client does) but unless we consider it interesting ourselves - a phone call could really backfire on our disposition towards you and your client for future coverage.

Wrong: Twitter, Especially DM

Sending a Direct Message from Twitter just ends up being another email. I tell myself, "I'll look at that later." How about a public Tweet that says "I've got news about a new ad platform targeting seniors on mobile browsers! DM me if you want it under embargo." We'll jump on that, because that's the kind of thing we eat up over here.

If you're pitching people on Twitter, you'd better have a whole lot of other interesting things to say between pitches. At the same time, when I visit the Twitter page of someone who is working for an interesting company, much less representing them on Twitter, I get disappointed (personally) if there is nothing about their work being said.

Wrong: Facebook

For most of us here at RWW at least, Facebook is a place for personal communication if anything at all. For me, it's like the email inbox I never check. What could be worse than that? If we knew each other in college, then by all means let's communicate by Facebook. I did once ruthlessly and publicly make fun of a certain PR person for pitching me cold on Facebook and after the ensuing kerfluffle we've become buds and I read every pitch she sends.

Personal connections are the best PR (isn't that what PR agents are hired to provide, in part - well developed relationships with press?) and everybody knows that being Facebook friends doesn't mean the same thing as being real friends.

Wrong: IM

Can you imagine having PR people IM you about their clients' events (and non-events, all too often)? That's the kind of thing that full time tech bloggers have to deal with! (Have I mentioned that the seat of my jeans are threadbare too? Oh, the suffering! Lol.)

Different members of our team have different feelings about IM pitches but I'm the only one that will tolerate them much. If we develop a personal relationship and I tell you we can IM, then we can IM. As of right now, though, I'm going to stop taking IMs from PR and startup people I haven't said I wanted to communicate that way with or that I don't do so with already.

If you as a PR or startup person can make yourself available by IM to answer questions when we're writing, that's better than great - it's fantastic. IM pitches, unless they are from people we know and they consist of nothing more than "Hey, company offering RSS feeds to mobile devices for 'low-supply of pet food in the pantry' alerts, about to launch - do you want info?" That's fine.

A Great Way to Do It: By RSS

One of the first things we all do every morning here is open up our RSS readers. We've got a folder for feeds from companies we're tracking and we scan through every new entry there. Sometimes we do it twice. It's fun - a hell of a lot more fun that mucking through email pitches.

PR people, please send us the RSS feeds of your clients' blogs and news releases.

The information that comes through these feeds is obviously public and there's no embargo - but if we didn't see something interesting in an embargoed email then we'll see it in RSS. Likewise, many companies blog about things that they might not consider cause for a press release but that we definitely want to write about.

The full fire-hose of company news and updates for us to pick out what's interesting, someplace outside of our email inboxes, free of dreadful press release rhetoric (skip to the second paragraph where details usually are, then skip past any executive quotes and hope there are readable details somewhere) - that sounds like a dream come true. I know that's where I get most of the stories I write about, not from email pitches. Send both, but company feeds are likely to be looked at more closely.

Most PR companies have changing client rosters, though, and OPML files are static files that don't update themselves. Here's what could be the best-case solution.

Voce Communications' Justin Kistner sent me a great OPML file in response to my asking on Twitter why so few PR people have sent my their clients' feeds. Here's the file Justin put together and here's what it contains:

• The feed for Voce's company blog, Voce Nation
• A feed for press releases, which he said was empty right now but will deliver the goods when there are items available
• A combined feed of all the Voce peoples' messages on Twitter, built using the attractive service Tweetpeek - something I hadn't seen before. I'm going to delete this feed from my reader just because I already converse with two thousand people on Twitter and I don't need more of those messages in my RSS reader. Better safe than sorry, though - an OPML file can be like a menu for subscribers to select from.
• The highlight of the file is a feed from Yahoo Pipes that splices together the blogs of all of Voce's PR clients. It's something that Justin can edit behind the scenes and I'll never know the difference - I'll just get posts from the feeds of new clients as he ads their feeds to the master feed I've subscribed to. It's a great solution to the problem.

  Hopefully he won't remove the feeds of companies that leave Voce, but maybe he should. That's his call, I probably won't notice the difference if I suddenly stop seeing one of hundreds of company feeds I'm subscribed to.

PR people, would you all please send us something like what Justin Kistner of Voce sent us? Please? The increased familiarity alone on our part with your clients would make it worth your time. If we're already reading your clients' blogs, we're also more likely to pay attention to your emails because we have some previous relationship with the companies you're reading about. If Yahoo Pipes is scary (it scared me for a long time, but now I can tell you it's easy) then check out these tutorials.

It's not that hard to do and our feed readers is where online journalists go to find new stories. Don't you want to meet us where we're at? It's also a great way to learn about the kinds of technologies that are in play - instead of just using old methods to pitch types of technology that you don't actually use or participate in.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/pitching_rww.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/pitching_rww.php Analysis / Strategy Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:24:07 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Robert Scoble blazed a big trail by blogging and producing video as a technical evangelist for Microsoft from 2003 through 2006. No longer at Microsoft, Scoble now produces media for media's sake at FastCompany.tv. Others have followed his lead, knowingly or not, and job titles like "social media evangelist" are no longer nearly as rare as they used to be.
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]]> Still, many companies wonder what kind of work an employee like that could do for them. We asked around and found seven shining stars engaging in online social media at work.

Big Picture

Two of the most striking things we learned by asking (on Twitter, in the middle of the work day, you'll note) were these.

There are now a whole lot of people doing this kind of work. An overwhelming number of people and companies were offered up as examples - we picked the following seven the best we could but there are many other people doing great work in this field that aren't mentioned here.

Second, there may be even more people doing this kind of work internally in large organizations. If we were to count the growing army of people evangelizing for social media use inside companies in an unofficial capacity, then there would be a far larger group still. We'd love to write another post later highlighting some of the people who've been most successful at getting their own co-workers excited about the benefits of using social media tools.

Without further ado, though, here are seven of our favorite examples of people doing public-facing social media work from inside companies today.

Sam Lawrence

When we asked for examples of people doing this kind of work well on Twitter, the first name that flooded our replies inbox was Jive Software's Sam Lawrence. A veteran marketer for big technology firms, Sam is now the Chief Marketing Officer for Jive, a Sequoia-funded enterprise collaboration suite.

On Twitter, but more prominently on his blog Go Big Always, Sam has quickly mastered the art of providing interesting value to the work lives of his readers and drawing in established social media leaders in a dignified way.

He's gently but firmly combative with competitors, sometimes challenges his own PR representatives and calls out Analyst firms the company has subscribed to. Designed by consultant Justin Kistner, Lawrence's blog is striking in appearance and is filled with oversized graphics, charts and videos.

The blog has drawn competitors and potential partners into the company's sphere of engagement through a remarkable number of comments for an enterprise exec's blog. Though Go Big Always is only a handful of months old, Lawrence has used it to rocket to prominence among thought leaders in emerging the social media market.

Daniela Barbosa

Daniela Barbosa is the Business Development Manager, at Synaptica, a division of Dow Jones Client Solutions. Barbosa is one of the most prominent advocates of semantic technology and data portability inside of a legacy institution.

Her personal blog leverages almost every bleeding edge web technology you can think of.

She's a frequent conference speaker, makes regular appearances on blog aggregator Techmeme and is an active participant in the Data Portability Working Group. Talk about Business Development 2.0!

"Daniela is the kind of change agent that is saving big corps whether they like it or not," Chris Saad, chairman of the Data Portability Working Group, told us. "She is leading by example and making waves of change both inside and outside the company. Everyone's very glad she is, too."

Photo by Mario Sundar

Jeremiah Owyang

Probably the first blogger ever to become an Analyst, Jeremiah Owyang now specializes in and produces extensive social media for the analyst firm Forrester. He's a widely loved Twitter user and a prolific blogger.

Owyang publishes blog posts with magnetic titles like "A List of Companies and Services That Provide Live Web Video Streaming," "Many Forms of Widget Monetization" and "Explaining OpenSocial to Your Executives."

Jeremiah is a great example of someone who offers to teach others as a way to draw them in. He's built a reputation as a generous contributor to social media conversations and thus has become a hub for business and tech professionals. That's a good place for an analyst to be.

Linda Skrocki

Linda Skrocki manages the community venues at Sun Microsystems, including the many Sun blogs, forums, media and Planets (RSS aggregation).

Skrocki writes a highly engaging Sun blog herself, where for example she recently announced that Sun blogs had just received their reader 100,000th comment. That on 97k blog posts on 4143 blogs. That's pretty remarkable for an enterprise focused community.

Asked about her social media work at Sun, Skorcki described it as follows.


"Along with a colleague, we have sessions that we conduct inside and outside of Sun. The sessions typically cover the benefits of leveraging the venues, do's and don'ts, and how to get started. The sessions are usually small (groups of 25 or so) and conducive to informal discussion while hitting the key points. External organizations that we've shared our experiences with include the United Nations in preparation for their Youth Summit, the DoD, other tech companies, etc. I'll be presenting to a Reuters Women's Group soon -- the group consists of women at various levels in their career and in various sectors."

In addition to being an active Twitter user, Skrocki is also working on putting Twitter to use for Sun events like the forthcoming JavaOne conference.

Disclosure: Sun is a consulting client of mine, though I haven't had the pleasure to work with Linda directly.

Paul Miller

Paul Miller is the community evangelist for UK informatics vendor Tails, one of the biggest library software companies in that country. Miller specifically evangelizes for the Tails semantic web platform.

Miller is one of the hosts of the often fascinating Talking With Tails podcast series, he has done one episode of what we hope will be a series of podcasts on the semantic web here at RWW and he recently started covering the semantic web in a ZDNet blog dedicated to the topic.

While this list of social media power users could be described as Scoble 2.0, Miller insisted that he is actually Scoble 3.0 (a joke about how the semantic web is referred to as web 3.0 - Miller is a very humble man).

Miller is part of a whole crew at Talis that uses social media to bring value to the lives of their audiences - including Talking co-host Richard Wallis and Danny Ayers who writes the excellent This Week's Semantic Web series of blog posts.

Kristie Wells

Kristie Wells does social media for app development and hosting service Joyent. She administers the company's well followed Twitter account, in addition to her own. She runs the company's Facebook group for customers, is a contributor to the user blog and is preparing to launch a How-to podcast series.

Is there any work being done over there with all this media socializing? There sure is; Joyent provides app hosting for thousands of companies, including some big ones like MLB.com, Oprah's Ambassador program and the LATimes. That history of success made good ammunition when Joyent recently faced criticism for former-customer Twitter's scaling issues. That break-up got talked about on blogs around the web, but social media savvy and the company's own blog came in very handy in response.

Aaron Fulkerson and the MindTouch Team

MindTouch, the makers of the DekiWiki platform, is a social media company that eats its own dog food very publicly. Every member of the team contributes to the company blog, discussing not just product developments but also general interest industry news.

The company's active developer forums are filled with media that users are able to repurpose for their own evangelism. The company integrates with a substantial number of other developer-level social media technologies.

They also use the sophisticated Viddler video platform so their videos can be tagged and commented on. See the down-home 4 minute example demo video below, the only thing missing is audio quality.

As a result of all this material being made available and the company's high degree of visibility in several social media fora, the marketability of the widely appreciated wiki software is further amplified. Mindtouch says their enterprise wiki software is downloaded 3,000 times every day.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the most successful recent examples of companies employing social media evangelists in order to communicate with existing users and bring new attention to their services. While many, many companies today know they ought to "have a blog," most are still unsure how to use them and are not sure why they would employ a specialist in making putting these new media to use.

This isn't entirely new ground, though. Many companies are finding the ROI of social media engagement to be essential to their momentum. We've highlighted just seven here, though, who are your favorite social media evangelists?

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/seven_leading_corporate_social_media_evangelists_today.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/seven_leading_corporate_social_media_evangelists_today.php Analysis / Strategy Fri, 11 Apr 2008 15:21:54 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Many of our readers here at ReadWriteWeb are brave explorers of what's new in technology - while working inside large, often slow-changing organizations. For those of you who fit that description, there's a new organization in the works called The Working Group. More than just another niche social network, this is a serious project that I expect will be in high demand.
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]]> The Group calls itself a "place for anyone to share their experiences, frustrations and successes in driving change inside large organizations." Monthly meetings, the first being this week, will combine guest speakers and open discussion. Account creation is required in the group's Ning social network, but anyone can join. (Too bad there's no OpenID at Ning.)

Founded by Oracle Corporation's Paul Pedrazzi (pictured here) and discussed on the Oracle AppsLab blog, the first teleconference meeting is scheduled for this Wednesday morning. (PST) It will begin with a 30 minute talk by guest speaker Oracle Chief Privacy Council Peter Lefkowitz, followed by a 30 minute open discussion.

The group is "not affiliated with Oracle or any other company," but it's nice to see some heavy-hitters getting involved as individuals.

Context

Building momentum for new paradigms, tools and strategies is something that gets easier when you've got other smart people in similar circumstances available to talk to.

If high-value guest speakers can continue to be lined up and the discussions are well moderated, I expect that this group and others like it will be very well received. There's certainly a growing number of people hungry for collective learning in their efforts to drive change in large organizations. Those are the people who will help keep the big companies relevant - something that cannot be taken for granted in a time of extreme disruption.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_working_group.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_working_group.php Analysis / Strategy Tue, 18 Dec 2007 03:54:32 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick William Slawski has compiled two very useful lists of acquisitions, first by Google and now by Yahoo (see also The Guardian's list). I'll add the third, Microsoft's acquisitions as listed on their corporate site. From 2003 on:

Nov. 3, 2005: FolderShare 
Nov. 3, 2005: media-streams.com AG 
Aug. 30, 2005: Teleo Inc. 
Jul. 20, 2005: FrontBridge Technologies 
Mar. 10, 2005: Groove Networks Inc. 
Feb. 8, 2005: Sybari Software Inc. 
December 16, 2004: GIANT Company Software 
April 26, 2004: ActiveViews 
April 30, 2003: PlaceWare 
Feb. 19, 2003: Connectix

The crucial one there was Groove, which Microsoft acquired on March 2005. It seems to have acted as a catalyst for their 'software as a service' strategy - Groove CEO and now Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie has been a leading light in that. Microsoft's acquisitions history suggests they strip off the technologies and human assets from their acquisitions and put them into Microsoft products. Not dissimilar to what Yahoo and Google do nowadays too.

I'd say Yahoo's key acquisitions over the past few years have been Overture (search), Oddpost (email), Ludicorp/Flickr (social software street cred). You can definitely see a pattern to all of Yahoo's purchases, because they usually get eventually re-branded and folded into the Yahoo business as part of their wide and deep product line. Overture products for instance are now Yahoo! Search products. Oddpost has morphed into Yahoo's Gmail competitor, the new-look AJAX-driven Yahoo! Mail. And Flickr's presence is being felt across the board, in products such as My Web 2.0 and Yahoo 360.

Google is a bit harder to figure out, because as Adam Rifkin noted a couple of months ago, Google tends to buy "small, creative, engineering-driven teams with no-bullshit cultures and interesting products and/or innovative technologies". Maybe the difference comes down to semiotics, as Ben Barren wrote:

"Yahoo's M+A semiotics read : fun, jagged, dangerous in the same way a rollercoast ride is; delicious, flickr, konfabulator (sadly renamed) Google's scrip semiotics are more complex, obtuse, asexual + asynchronous : Android, Akwan, Urchin, Keyhole."

Whatever the outcome of all these acquisitions, expect more to come in 2006. Already people are talking about a Microsoft/Newsgator deal, Yahoo/Netflix, Yahoo/CNET, Yahoo/TiVo. And what about Google/Feedburner? (a shock pick suggested to me by one of my correspondents).

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]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/acquisitions_an.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/acquisitions_an.php Analysis / Strategy Wed, 28 Dec 2005 13:05:46 -0800 Richard MacManus Last night Yahoo! announced they are integrating RSS into their web mail and alerts products. As Scott Gatz explained in an interview with PodTech: Yahoo's plan, which started in January 2004 when they launched RSS in the My Yahoo portal, is to "bring RSS to the masses". I liked how Ben Barren described this as Yahoo's 'RSS Everywhere' strategy. If that's not Yahoo's slogan in regards to RSS, then it should be. Oh wait, Microsoft has already used it - back in June 05 when they announced RSS would be integrated into the Vista OS (then known as Longhorn). Microsoft has also since announced RSS integration within Windows Live and a new RSS extension getting big wraps, called SSE.

Which brings me to my point - Yahoo and Microsoft are busy building out an 'RSS Everywhere' strategy. What is Google doing with RSS? They toyed with integrating RSS into Gmail - remember Web Clips? Last month Google released an RSS Reader, which turned out to be average by industry standards. And they've implemented bits and pieces of RSS into Search and Google News. But compare Google's clumsy RSS experiments with the total acceptance of and immersion in RSS by Yahoo and Microsoft.

Watching Google and RSS is like watching a high school student experiment with a chemistry set. Meanwhile Yahoo and Microsoft are busy inserting RSS into their DNA.

As I wrote back in April, I think Google wants to harness RSS. Most of their huge take of advertising revenue comes to them via webpages - their own pages, plus external webpages that use Google Adsense. Google wants to ensure that huge revenue doesn't get siphoned off by RSS-izing everything. The Gmail 'Web Clips' feature mentioned above had adverts alternating with the content, so it was an unsubtle experiment at monetizing RSS.

Perhaps Google should take a leaf from Yahoo and Microsoft's book and start immersing itself in RSS, instead of trying to harness it. As Dave Winer mused today, Google shouldn't try to lock in content. The value of RSS is that it's the best form of content distribution we have on the Web today. RSS - you're soaking in it. Hmmm, perhaps Yahoo should make that their slogan?

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]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rss_everywhere.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rss_everywhere.php Analysis / Strategy Wed, 30 Nov 2005 13:12:11 -0800 Richard MacManus