18 posts tagged “blog”

According to the August/September 2008 Insight Report from MarketTools, 68% of Americans who spend time online regularly visit blogs, online communities or social networks.  That's staggering, especially when you consider that the number of online Americans that engage in product research online to help them make purchase decisions is just 33%. 

Check out the demographic breakouts and more details on the study here.

One thing the study doesn't cover, but I'd like to know: What is the percentage is of online Americans who have received a product recommendation through a social network (like Facebook, etc.) have gone on to purchase that product? 

Also, if only 68% access social and/or community sites and just 33% are do research on products, what do 100% of online Americans do on the internet? General research? Access email? Search for news?

The power of social media (including social networking) constantly amazes me. It keeps people in touch with each other, facilitates introductions that may otherwise never have happened, and so much more.  Since I first started writing this blog a year and a half ago, I've received emails and introductions from all sorts of interesting people - entrepreneurs, techies, mobile industry followers, media agencies, etc. - some famous in tech circles, others not.  Several of these introductions have remained electronic 'friendships' over email or Facebook.  Others have resulted in 'real life' friendships, when one of us realizes we have friends in common or we meet face-to-face at an industry event.  Today, I got to thinking about how amazing this really is when social media faciltated yet another interesting introduction....

A man who works in the Business Development Agency for a European country, pinged me on LinkedIn.  He wanted to know whether I would be interested in consulting for companies in his country that are expanding to the US.  In the course of our email conversation, he wrote:

I've known for a long time [about] the many different forms of social media interaction, including Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, etc., but I never thought of it as something more than personal interaction… kid’s stuff that made a few people very rich. I guess I was quite wrong. So, I’ve returned a few times to your blog, searched a few other related blogs and started researching that issue more extensively. I feel, in fact, that there may be a much more around that concept than I thought.

His email made me pause.  Living in San Francisco, a stones throw from Silicon Valley, where "social media" is pre-printed on everyone's "buzz word bingo" card, it's easy to forget that most people - especially those outside of America are still just beginning to understand the potential of social media.  Five years ago, when I was living in the UK, I would have never anticipated that I'd be writing a blog or (gasp) meeting people over the internet.  My British friends all thought I was crazy and looked at me strangely when I first mentioned that I was writing a blog.  Today, at least one of them has a blog, and most of the others are on Facebook.  And, that's the tip of the iceberg. The world is only just beginning to see the potential of social media, and social networking is just the start.

If you like my blog, this video will make you laugh, cry, or both! 

The folks at Activeweave (makers of Stickis, which I've written about before), have just introduced a great new website and plug-in called BlogRovr.  BlogRovr is a great little tool aimed at blog enthusiasts.  It allows you to see whatever your favorite bloggers have written about anywhere on-line. 

Here's how it works:

1. Visit Blogrovr.com and sign-up for an account
   
2. Enter the URLs of your favorite blogs
   
3. Anytime your favorite blogger mentions something about a site you're visiting, BlogRovr will deliver the related blog content to you via a Sticki. 
   

• The note is unobtrusive - a small icon in the bottom right hand corner of your browser window. 
  
• You can expand the button into a web overlay by clicking it.  Similarly, you can close it just like any other window. 
  
• You can turn BlogRovr on or off any time.
• No spyware, etc. in the app.
  

Not only does BlogRovr keep you in touch with what your favorite bloggers are thinking about what you're looking at, it also presents a great opportunity to learn what products/services/websites those on your blogroll are writing about.  This is especially useful tool for:

• Researching new product/service providers
  
• Doing market research/ getting to know a new industry or topic
  
• Investigating what bloggers are saying about you and your competitors
• Etc.
  

Give it BogRovr a try and post a comment with your thoughts. 

Internet search engines and social networking sites are enabling companies to do their "due diligence" on prospective employees more extensively than ever before.  According to an article I read this morning, Google (and other big companies) are researching prospective recruits by investigating their on-line presence on social networking sites.  But, businesses aren't the only ones benefiting from the research made possible by on-line social networking sites.  Real people are using social media to their advantage by researching prospective friends, significant others, and even criminals.  With that in mind, I thought you might like the following two real-life social media "research" success stories... I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried!

...

A good friend of a friend ("FoaF") was held-up at gunpoint last month just one block from his house in the Mission / Noe Valley area of San Francisco (AKA: "Baja Noe"). The robber stole his wallet and briefcase, which had his laptop and business cards inside.  Three days after the incident, he got a phone call from a woman who claimed to have his laptop... She said that she was calling from "Microsoft XP" (hilarious) and needed the log-on password to verify that the laptop was his (even more hilarious).  When he said that he wouldn't give the password out over the phone, the woman on the phone proposed that he email it to her, and she gave him her Yahoo email address (most hilarious!). 

From her email address, FoaF was able to guess her MySpace ID.  He looked her up and discovered her full MySpace profile including (gasp) a photo!  He also found that she was linked to a "friend" who FoaF recognized as the man who robbed him.  Best of all, the robber had a photo of his gun on his web page!).  FoaF gave all this info to the police and they recovered the laptop last week.  The woman who the police recovered his laptop from alleged that she bought it from "someone she didn't know."  Unsurprisingly, they don't fully believe her story.

...

A group of tech-savvy friends and I recently "saved" a less-tech savvy friend (I'll call her "Jane") from a second date with "Jack," a blind date she was introduced to by an equally non-tech-savvy acquaintance.  Jane went on the first blind date and was captivated enough by Jack's superficial charm and wit long enough to consider a second date.  Prospects were good for Jack (who is apparently very smooth/sociable in person, once held a senior managerial position at Merrill Lynch and is now an accomplished management consultant) until our "Google Intervention," which uncovered his personal blog.  Jack's blog chronicled his last 18 years of "sex-ploits" (including shallow 'apologies' to women he claims to have raped in college), on-going misogynistic views about "chicks", and less than savory (ahem) medical history.  It was so graphic that it made Tucker Max's blog read like a children's bedtime story.  Everyone involved (except maybe Jack) agrees that Jane was lucky to have emerged from her date with Jack unscathed and that date number two never materialized.

Web 2.0 is changing the way that people publish, access, and spread news.  Newspaper subscriptions are down, and the number of bloggers is up.  Six Apart and other companies are making it easy for everyday people to self-publish on-line “blogs”.  Gone are the days when journalists and authors were the only ones who could voice their opinion.  Now, anyone can do it.  At the same time that conventional newspapers are struggling to keep up subscriptions and bloggers are growing in numbers, the book market remains stable.  There’s something special about books beyond the words printed on their pages and the stories they tell.  For me, it’s the way that they look together on a shelf, their unique smell, their simplicity and tangibility. Laptops and Sony Readers haven’t replaced coffee table books.  Bookshelves still sell well, and bookstores are still profitable.  The problem with books is that until now, it has been difficult and expensive to self-publish books.  San Francisco-based start-up Blurb is changing that. 

Blurb is capitalizing on the rising interest in on-line self-publishing (e.g. blogs) and the continuing popularity of books.  In their beta release, they’ve made it simple and inexpensive for people and businesses to self-publish hardback and paperback books in both small and large quantities.  Blurb allows people to self-publish all types of quality books up to 440 pages– blog books, photo books, text and picture books, cookbooks, poetry books (coming soon), personal portfolios, novels and dissertations (coming soon), and more.
 

My favorite Blurb concept is the "Blog Book".  Bloggers, who use TypePad and WordPress (and soon Blogger, LiveJournal, and Moveable Type), will find Blurb’s “Blog Slurper” technology particularly useful.   Blog Slurper imports and maps blog text, comments, images, and links into a draft book, which can then be customized. I sent a note to Blurb yesterday asking whether VOX will be a supported platform for their Blog Slurper, and I’ll update this entry if/when I hear back.

I also like how easy it is for everyday people (non-bloggers) to easily create books with full-color pictures using Blurb’s BookSmart application (compatible on both Mac an PC).  Blurb offers templates for a variety of different types of “ready made” books – baby, dog, cat, and more.  Imagine what the ease of self-publishing means for families, friends, students, professors, small businesses, and more!

The best part about Blurb from a Social Media perspective is that it offers users the ability to promote and sell their books to others via Blurb’s on-line bookstore. Blurb is making it possible for aspiring authors to leverage the Internet to start their own publishing empires – just like musicians Clap Your Hands Say Yeah  and others did on MySpace.   I wish there was more of a community aspect to Blurb, where users could join “groups” like Vox and Gather and talk about their favorite “blurb” books written on specific topics.  Who knows, since the current version of Blurb is a beta, that functioanlity may come in time. In the meantime, I like how easy Blurb makes it for everyday people almost anywhere in the world to self-publish books, inexpensively.  Pricing starts as follows, with 10% discounts for 25-199 books, 15% discount for 200-400 books and larger discounts for even bigger quantities:

Barack Obama just launched a social media/ social networking website to further his presidential campaign in 2008: my.barackobama.com. While I haven't made any decisions about who I will support in the 2008 presidential election, I signed up for a "test account" on My.Barackobama.com to test the social media functionality of Obama's website.  The features/functionality of the site are robust. Users can:

• Write a blog
• Help Barack fundraise
• Discover events nearby/ Create events
  
• Network with other supporters
• Invite friends
• Write messages to "friends" (e.g. fellow Barack Obama supporters)
• Join groups/ start groups (just like VOX or Gather)
  

If you're a Barack Obama supporter, the site looks like a great way to interact with other supporters.  If you don't support Obama, the site looks like a good way to get the inside scoop on what his supporters are saying.  I didn't find any noticeable bugs, which is a good sign.  It looks like the site uses a customiseable white label social media platform - ala Five Across or Social Platform, though I couldn't find any sign of which solution was used.  I did notice that the blogging feature disables adding  hyperlinks, which is a little frustrating, though it's not difficult to understand why disabling hyperlinking would make the site easier to administer.

I'm looking forward to seeing what role social media plays in the 2008 presidential election.  So far, Barack is the first candidate to launch his own on-line social network.  Hillary Clinton launched her campaign using an on-line video to announce her candidacy and has a blog.  Her campaign supporters are also using 3rd party social networking sites like MySpace to make waves.  However, at the time of writing this blog, Clinton has yet to launch her own social network.  Two different strategies from two different democratic candidates.  One thing is clear - the forthcoming election campains will provide interesting case studies for anyone interested in social media marketing.  I expect that by 2008, social media marketers will discover a lot more about how to properly target and ignite a winning word of mouth campaign fueled by social media.

As many fellow VOXers know, there is no way to tell how many hits your blog gets (or how many people read or talk about it)... Six Apart doesn't provide a counting utility to bloggers. (If they did, the bloggers generating the most traffic on VOX might be tempted to leave to start revenue generating blogs of their own.)  I often wonder how many people actually read my blog, besides those that add me to their VOX "neighborhood" or leave comments.  As far as I'm aware, no one has developed a way to accurately automate the combined measurement of blog traffic, quality of content, links from other blogs, etc.  Technorati does a good job of identifying who is talking about which bloggers, so for now, it is what I use to gage how I'm doing in the blogging universe.  But, Technorati only tells part of the story. 

This morning, I took a look at the rating of my blog on Technorati.  When I first checked the rating score several months ago, my blog was ranked somewhere around 900,000th. The next time I checked it (weeks later), it jumped to around 300,000th.  This morning when I looked (gasp) it jumped to the 125,511th top blog.  That's over 700% improvement!  Unfortunately, that's not at all impressive when you explore what it means.  Technorati's rating score indicates that socialmedia.vox.com was linked to by 52 other bloggers 30 times.  The more bloggers that link to this blog, the higher my rating score goes. 

When I dug a little deeper into who was talking about my blog, I realized that the links to my blog included:

• Legit mentions from other blogs (though there was a duplicate mention, which counted twice - both the original post and then the archived, permanent post).
  
• People who added me to their VOX neighborhood (My hyperlinked image appears on their vox home page.)
  
• Multiple links from fraudulent blog sites... By this, I mean links from websites formatted to look like blogs but lacking in their own content.  Take, for example, "MySpaceRIP.com".  (I won't hyperlink the URL because the undesired result would be an improvement in Myspacerip.com's Technorati rating.) This appears to be a holding page for a domain name for sale + advertising space for sale.

All of the bogus "link to's" that I saw listed under my blog made me question Technorati's usefulness as a "rating" tool. Based on my experience, no real meaning can be derived from the actual ranking.  However, Technorati is an incredibly useful tool for discovering who is talking about blogs and topics.  One of the most interesting things that I discovered when trolling through my "link to's" was one blogger's opinion of the "Top Bloggers On Communities".  If you are interested in on-line communities, this list is a great resource for new reading material.

If any of you out there know of a better tool than Technorati for measuring the impact and popularity of blogs, please post a comment or, if you're a non-voxer (and can't leave a comment), email me, and I'll post your comment manually.

According to a new survey, published by The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, “the hype” around social media “is real.”  In November and December or 2006, U Mass Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research, under the direction of blogging researchers Eric Mattson and Nora Ganim Barnes, completed a telephone survey of “Inc. 500” list to find out if and how they’re using social media.  The “Inc. 500,” published every September by Inc. Magazine, is a list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States.  According to the executive summary, existing research shows that 8% of Fortune 500 companies have a public blog, and the U Mass team set out to find out whether the use of social media was the same in companies that were “selected by growth rate rather than revenue.”  What they found was encouraging.  Fast growing companies are utilizing social media at much higher rates than earlier research indicates for Fortune 500 companies.  In the executive summary, the researchers write:

“As one of, if not the, first studies of social media adoption with statistical significance, this research proves conclusively that social media is coming to the business world and sooner than many anticipated.”

The full results of the study will be published throughout 2007 in a variety of journals.  Keep your eyes peeled for an article in The Journal of New Communications Research coming this March. The researchers from U Mass have promised to send me a link the the article soon as it is available. When they do, I'll post it in this blog. In the meantime, the executive summary is well worth a read.

Included in the summary are several interesting graphs. The highlights include:

• When asked how important social media was to a company's business/ marketing strategy, most respondents felt that it was important:
  
• 26%= Very important
• 40%= Somewhat important
• When asked what type of social media companies used, responses were as follows:
  
• 33%= Message/Bulletin Boards
• 27%= Social Networking
• 24%= Online Video
• 19%= Blogging
• 17%= Wikis
• 11%= Podcasting
  

I can’t help but wonder: Did social media help propel the responding companies into the Inc. 500, or is it just coincidence?  Then again, I’m still wondering, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
 
 

Gather is a social networking site for adults. It is free, fun, well organized, and a little bit like vox, though it encourages cross posting of blogs, articles, comments, etc. around specific "groups" of participants with similar interests.  There are some really interesting blogs, conversations, and participants happening on Gather... 

For example, one of America's most well known criminal lawyers, Alan Dershowitz has a group on Gather and is in the midst of publishing a six part series of articles on a variety of controversial, and politically fueled topics.

Today, Borders launched a new group on Gather, making it one of the many companies that is now using social networking to further business by reaching out to prospective customers.

Gather works on a revenue sharing model, not unlike other social media sites like Revver.  Here's how Gather's  CEO describes it:

Gather is a place for you to connect with people who share your passions. It's a place where you can contribute thought, art, commentary, or inspiration. We will reward you for all the great things you will share with others in your communities of interest. And together, we think we will create a pretty special place to hang out online.

Gather will make money by displaying advertising to people who use Gather's services. It just seems fair that we share our advertising revenue with you based on the quality and popularity of the content you contribute on Gather. We will also share some of our revenue with you if you choose to use the site actively, exploring content that others write, searching on Gather and on the web, and inviting your friends, family, and colleagues to use the site. We will pay occasional users in points that you will be able to use to purchase goods and services from Gather partners in a few months. We will pay frequent users, who write great content consistently, in cash if they choose.

I think Gather is a really interesting site. I like the way that it makes adults with similar interests discoverable to each other.  I've only used it for a short time, so I'll be interested to see what my longer-term impressions are.  To test Gather.com a bit more and hopefully extend the readership of this blog, I've set up my own Gather group: socialmediagroup.gather.com.  I hope that people will use this group to share information on social media, social networking, web 2.0, mobile 2.0 and related topics.
 

Do you use Gather? If so, post a comment and let me know what you think.  If you're a non VOXer, feel free to drop me a line with your comment and I'll post it manually: socialmediablog@gmail.com.