Introducing Social Media To Businesses

If this were a course, JustMeans would be the teacher of social media for businesses. JustMeans provides a way for businesses to use various tools associated with social media from blogging to podcasting with ease. To make businesses feel comfortable in early adopter territory, traditional medias such as press releases are also provided. With these tools, users, or "stakeholders", can easily engage with businesses on JustMeans via the company's profile.

Social Responsibility

JustMeans rides the economic "green wave" of corporate social responsibility. This is also one of the key focuses of the JustMeans site and the businesses that engage with it. Businesses can post about the "social responsibilities" that they are upholding to keep users and fans of a businesses network up-to-date on their goals and outreach programs. The site includes a forum for businesses and consumers to collectively brainstorm about ideas for change. This way, users are actually heard, while companies can receive better feedback about what they can do better.

Connecting For A Collective Change

JustMeans is a great platform for connecting businesses that are socially responsible with users that appreciate being informed not only about a company's ethics, but what a company is doing to insure that they are upholding the standards they've set and obligations they've committed to from a social standpoint. JustMeans is not only a network to help introduce businesses to social media, but a platform for collective social change.

Hitwise also noted that MySpace has seen an increase of 73% year-over-year in average time spent. So while they may be losing a small amount of total social networking traffic to Facebook, MySpace is better engaging the visitors it has retained. Interestingly, competing web metrics firm Compete paints a different picture, suggesting that year-over-year average stay has fallen 9.9%. Differences in how each stat is measured could explain the dissimilar results, however, though they are strikingly different.

- 83% watch video clips, up from 62% in the last study in June 2007
- 78% read blogs, up from 66%
- 57% of internet users are now members of a social network
- RSS consumption is growing rapidly up from 15% to 39%
- Podcasts are now mainstream digital content, listened to by 48%

Social networks have been "a key driver for the growth of social media":

- 22% of social network users have installed a widget or applications
- 55% have shared photos
- 22% have shared their videos
- 31% have started a blog
- The world’s biggest social network is MySpace with 32% weekly reach followed by Facebook on 23%

The report also states that social media is a global phenomenon:

- Top markets for blogging – China 70% of internet users write a blog, Philippines 66% and Mexico 60%
- Top markets for social networking – Philippines 83%, Hungary 76% and Poland 76%
- China is the world's largest blogging market with 42m bloggers versus 26m in the US

Those last stats will be an eye opener for many, because the US web tech market gets most of the attention of the blogosphere and mainstream media. But with China having 42m bloggers compared to the US's 26m, there is large scope for social media to flourish there - even despite China's political issues with social media.

I get that sometimes, which says a lot more about my own insecurities and the extent to which the social Web replicates the social dynamics of high school than it does about any real risk. My social network includes some very forgiving, open-minded people... and the online world is much, much bigger than anything I've tapped into so far.

Just an example: when I look through the list of the top 100 Vancouver Twitterers by number of followers, I don't recognize the vast majority of names. That tells me that a big conversation is going on (or a lot of small conversations) that I'm not a part of.

Which is cool. It's a big ol' blogosphere, and I can't possibly hope to keep tabs on any more than my small corner of it.

It's also a handy reminder to avoid the temptation of generalizing about the social Web from our own experience if it. For any of us who wants to understand how the Web and the way we use it are evolving and make some intelligent guesses about the future of social media, breaking out of our comfortable little circles and exploring a little is critical.

More Noise to Signal.

Title: Please ignore any Quechup.com Invites - It's a spam engine

Message: I am writing this with profound embarrassment.

I was recently tricked by a spam engine posing as a new social network. I got an invite from someone I knew and trusted, signed up to see what was about. Two days later, Quechup sent out SPAM to my entire address book.

Please ignore or delete all emails claiming to be from me that mention a site called Quechup.com.

Please also accept my apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

I won't mention the name of the person who sent this message, because it isn't their fault. Clearly Quechup has broken the golden rule of social networks and abused the trust of their users. Quechup's tagline is "the social networking platform sweeping the globe" - however it seems to be doing that via an email spam campaign.

Our recommendation: stay away from Quechup. You may also adopt my own current rule and not sign up to new social networks unless there's a clear - and new, unique - benefit to you. After all, how many social networks do you need?

As Michael Chin points out on the KickApps blog, social media first changed how we interacted with friends, family, and customers. Now, as consumers are getting more familiar with these tools, they also expect them to be a way to interact with companies - and based on this data from Cone, they want this to be a two-way conversation.

Here are some other interesting data points from the study:

• 60% of Americans regularly interact with companies on a social media site
• 43% of consumers say that companies should use social networks to solve the consumers' problems
• 41% believe that companies should use social media tools to solicit feedback on products and services
• Men are more likely to use social media tools to interact with a company than women (33% vs. 17%)
• 33% of younger consumers (18-34) and those with household incomes over $75,000 believe that companies should try to market to them through social networks

It would be nice to see Cone break these numbers down a bit more. What types of social media sites, for example, do users prefer? Are there any specific categories of companies and brands that they want to see on these sites? How exactly do they want to be marketed to? What do they think about implications for their privacy?

What is clear, however, is that social media is quickly becoming an important means for companies to reach consumers - and that consumer are also quickly changing their expectations about how, when, and where they want to be marketed to. As more users are embracing social media (and often to the detriment of traditional media), companies have no choice but to follow them.

This is further supported by data about what consumers do when mobile social networking. Checking for both comments and messages from their friends register above 50% for mobile social network users and 45% of users post status updates. In other words, they're doing the same sort of things on their phone as they would do if at their computer. The phone is just an extension of their online social networking life, not a separate and different platform for new types of interactions.

The survey, which was conducted 2Q, 2008, interviewed 500 users of online social networks. Out of those users, only 1% had visited a social network on their phone only. A mobile social network, for example, would be phone-only. Yikes. That number is low.

So Where Does This Leave Mobile Social Networks?

At first glance, we have to admit, these numbers don't look promising for mobile social networks. Although it's possible that some of these social networks will stick around thanks to strong and supportive niche audiences, it doesn't look like any today are poised for mainstream success.

Then again, it could just be too soon to tell. Given how long it takes for mainstream users to discover any new technology, it may be just a matter of time before mobile social networking really takes off. With the recent explosion of new touchscreen smart phones (iPhone, Android, , HTC Dream, Instinct, LG Dare, etc.) designed with web surfing in mind, mobile social networking could still be right around the corner.

His thoughts might surprise you. Is the firehose of social data further killing our attention spans? Are drunken Facebook party pictures necessarily a bad thing? How do n00bs help refresh the echo chamber? Spend eight minutes of your life with one of social media's friendliest thought leaders; you're guaranteed to hear something new.

Heuer's Social Media Camp is taking place today at the Roger Smith Hotel, a highly social media-friendly venue in Manhattan. They're famous in the bacon-obsessed tech scene for their daily bacon happy hours.

• Session 1: Social Media Marketing Fundamentals
• Session 2: Linkbait - Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites
• Session 3: Extra! Extra! The Social News Sites
• Session 4: A Marketer‚Äôs Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
• Session 5: Keynote Q & A with Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us & Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon
• Session 6: Effectively Leveraging Social Networking
• Session 7: Evangelist - The Marketer‚Äôs Role in SMM
• Session 8: Micro Communities
• Session 9: Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and Answer Sharing
• Session 10: Final Session - Wikipedia Clinic

I first remember hearing about the term "social graph" in May while Mark Zuckerberg was on stage announcing the Facebook Platform. That probably wasn't the first time the term was used, but it seems to be the time it entered our collective conscience and started being used with more regularity. At the time, I remember thinking to myself, "wait, what's a social graph?" It seems I wasn't alone in my confusion. The social graph is a reference to graph theory, which in general, if I understand correctly, models connections between things. There's really nothing wrong with this term, but it's math or computer science phraseology and doesn't do very well as a marketing term, in my opinion.

"Now if you showed that diagram to most educated people, they probably would call it a network, and before we talked about social graphs we called them social networks, and you know what -- they're exactly the same thing, and social network is a much less confusing term, so why don't we just stick with it? (Answer: we should, imho.) So if you don't want to sound like an idiot, call a social graph a social network and stand up for your right to understand technology, and make the techies actually do some useful stuff instead of making simple stuff sound complicated." -- Dave Winer

Not everyone agrees with Winer. Robert Scoble posted a response today in which he says that your social network is who you know, while your social graph is who you're connected to based on interests, location, work, etc. "The Social Graph is NOT my social network," Scoble writes. "My Social Network is my friends list. But the Social Graph shows a LOT more than that."

Scoble might be right. Or Winer might be. But semantic arguments aside, I think the first commenter on Scoble's post sums it up nicely:

"When I first heard the term social graph my thought was 'what now?', graph did not resonate at all. It still doesn’t." -- PXLated

Everyone already understood what a social network was -- it's a term we've been using for years. Everyone knows about networking. When you go schmooze with your peers at a party you're networking, not graphing. Most people don't get "social graph" the way they do "social network."

As Tom Morris, a commenter on Nick Carr's post on the debate says, "The fact is that the phrase 'social network data' describes everything that 'social graph' does without having to explain graph theory to those who don't understand it." Yes! Social graph may be a valuable way to talk about this stuff with mathematicians, but it is still a poor choice as a marketing term. I think it's time we retire it (at least in anything that isn't targeted toward computer scientists) and return to saying social network. How about it?

Blogger and PR guy Steve Rubel has a solution: use Gmail. In a post yesterday Steve outlined how to turn Gmail into what he calls a "Social Network Hub" which aggregates activity from friends across multiple networks and even lets him post status messages via email.

These are good tips and a nice way to organize much of your social networking activity around a single hub that you already use. Do you have any tips for cutting through the social network overload? Leave your ideas in the comments below.

Photo credit: wiseacre

We suppose he could have used other comparisons, but none would have the impact of comparing the technology to sex. It's true, though. In fact, we'll even expand on that thought a bit. For example, at first, Twittering your thoughts may feel awkward and strange. It might even be a little uncomfortable. But give yourself time to get comfortable with the process and next thing you know, you'll be Twittering away, enjoying yourself in the process. In fact, you might even get to the point of craving Twitter. How many Twitter addicts out there have seen or heard something interesting and their first thought was "Oh man, I have to Twitter that!" (Our hands are raised.)

But the overall point of Colony's blog post was that you won't and you can't get social media unless you engage in it. That seems pretty straightforward to us, but you'd be surprised how many people think they're experts in the matter, despite having an abandoned Twitter account...or worse, none at all. And then there are the companies rejecting social media because "it's just not right for them" - a decision they've made without even so much as a few weeks of experimentation. How sad. Just remember Mr. or Ms. CEO, you may find social media a boring waste of time, but you'd better believe that your customers are out there using it everyday. Ignore it at your peril.

"Companies in general don't value social media marketing as much as they should," said Noff. "They're afraid of it; they don't understand it; and therefore, they just don't do it. Yet it's the most cost-efficient way of marketing there is."

We also talked to Noff about the infinite measurement possibilities inherent in social media and the kinds of tools marketers should be using to optimize their online campaigns. She also spoke about the occasional difficulty of measuring specific conversion metrics for social media marketing campaigns, and she gave a good word to consultants in the social space.

In light of recent comments on video posts and out of respect for Ms. Noff, commenters are particularly requested to omit the words "hot" and "chick" and other terms of that general timbre from their musings below. Thanks for doing your part to keep ReadWriteWeb classy.

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management, a report from the Altimeter Group released earlier this month, serves to help companies and organizations understand the changing territory. The report offers a thorough framework with which companies can strategize their adoption of social CRM projects.

The report has six recommendations for organizations: Breathe social. Complement existing CRM processes. Measure social CRM projects on business goals rather than solely on engagement. Be prepared for rapid change. Find other social CRM pioneers.

The most important, perhaps: Act now. The report cautions companies against falling even further out of step with customers by not engaging with social technologies to expand their CRM processes. Well-researched and with clear definitions, the report could also help companies avoid undertaking social CRM projects merely for the buzz.

Social Search still doesn't have a super-prominent place in the Google Search results pages, but make no mistake: This is a very big step. What's your portal to the Internet: Google's algorithmic search of the Web at large, or your social circle of people on Facebook? That's the battle for the future that Google and Facebook are waging now, and Google Social Search is a big move. Facebook search is nowhere near as good.

Last week we wrote about how social networking is fast approaching the importance of online of search in terms of Web traffic. One vision of the future, though, has posited that social and search won't remain separate forever.

Do you want to have your questions answered only via your friends and their online content? No, probably not. But do you want to have your questions answered without the input of your friends and their trusted content? You probably don't want that either. Google Social Search is a nice combination of search and social. Facebook's search is terribly weak in comparison. That's where the real competition is, not between Google and Bing or Yahoo.

One interesting caveat, of course, is that most people have friend networks on Facebook, not in Gmail or Google Reader. Your Facebook Friends aren't included in Google Social Search, as far as we can tell. Update: Limited information from Facebook may be included in Google Social Search if your friends have associated their Facebook profiles with Google Profiles. But after chasing the Google Social Search team around on the phone for 15 minutes and just getting a PR-answer about this, we're left to conclude that the rivalry is as heated as we originally reported. Murali Viswanathan, Social Search product manager sent this by email: "If someone links to their Facebook account from their Google profile, Social Search may surface that user's public profile page. These are the same public profile pages already available on a search of Google.com and other search engines today."

Give it a try and let us know what you think.