Brian Solis » widget

Twitter Releases New Widget for Lists

Brian Solis — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:14:24 +0000

Twitter recently expanded its new Lists service to users network-wide and in doing so, injected a sense of excitement, confusion, and also utility. Lists represent a significant milestone for Twitter as it transcends asynchronous conversations and and broadcast messages into a form of intelligence gathering, education, entertainment, and news.

Twitter Lists are also stirring controversy as many believe that it sets the foundation for a new level of establishing a metric for influence. Whereas prominence was measured by the number of followers as well as the friends-to-follower ratio, now the amount of Lists that include any given entity factors into an equation for establishing authority. At a minimum, the power of Lists is in the gesture in of itself. The act of including someone is a more significant validation and token of respect and friendship than a simple “follow” and in some cases more symbolic and meaningful than a RT (retweet). We take cognizance of intellectual, isolated, and emotional substance.

Additionally, Twitter Lists signify an important art form of curation. Individually, we are empowered to create valuable lists, by theme and voice, in order to provide a service to ourselves and those who share the same passions, interests, and beliefs as us.

Twitter rolled out an important new feature that untethers Lists to journey across Websites and blogs as a fully contained, customizable widget, ergo a channeled, live experience. Now curated feeds can channel into the outside Web to share insights with others who may or may not use Twitter, including those who may or may not follow these individuals online or in the real world.

Most notably, List widgets are updated in real time, a capability not yet included in streams viewed on Twitter.com. If a Tweet is worthy of reply or RT, a “reply” button appears as you hover over the Tweet of interest.

Be mindful of these small, but important updates. Essentially, Lists are a new form of information aggregation and syndication. Lists and List Widgets serve as a new genre of a very personal RSS feedreaders. And now, these curated contextual streams are portable and embeddable as well.

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Facebook Advertising to Surpass MySpace by 2011

Brian Solis — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:45:09 +0000

MySpace has been losing “face” over the course of the last year. With sliding traffic and attention as well as shifts in management and reductions in staff, MySpace is not only a place for friends, but also a place for skeptics.

According to a Compete.com, Facebook received 122,559,672 unique visits in June 2009 twice that of rival MySpace, which realized only 60,973,908 unique visitors. In year-over-year comparisons, Facebook volume skyrocketed with 248.17% while Myspace slightly recoiled, down 5.65%. The good news for both networks is that June represented positive growth over the previous month with Facebook visits growing by 8.45% and MySpace realizing a bump of 7.19%.

Not only has Facebook surpassed MySpace in traffic, according to eMarketer, Facebook appears primed to overtake the once dominant network in ad revenue as well.

Social Media appears to be an unsteady landscape tied directly to the popularity, trendiness, and momentum of any given network at any given moment in time.

eMarketer anticipates US spending at MySpace to fall 15% to $495 million in 2009 from $585 million in 2008. In contrast, Facebook will grow from $210 million in 2008 to $230 million in 2009.

After reviewing the numbers, an interesting observation surfaced…Advertising spending on Facebook and MySpace alone account for 2x the total advertising dollars going to all other networks combined. Also, widgets and applications will continue to grow with funding up 6.1% from 40 million in 2008 to $70 million in 2009.

Even though Facebook 2009 projections are roughly 40% of MySpace revenue, Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Social Network Ad Spending: A Brighter Outlook Next Year, expects Facebook to surpass MySpace revenues by 2011, “Facebook, once a distant second to MySpace, has outperformed its rival in nearly every measure of usage—and is on track to surpass MySpace in ad spending by 2011.”

Williamson also predicted a brighter future for advertising spending on social networking, “The expected rebound in spending will come as more companies focus on creating and implementing an overall social marketing strategy. And it is a clear indication that the experimental phase of social network marketing is finally drawing to an end.”

Indeed 2009 painted a bleak picture as spending was down an estimated 3%. The good news is that according to eMarketer, budgets will grow by 13.2% in 2010 and 8.2% in 2011.

I imagine that by 2010, we’ll finally see a revenue model introduced by Twitter. Perhaps those numbers will only trend as opposed to fanning out once advertising becomes an option at the highly sought after network.

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Facebook Helps Brands and Personalities Transform Visitors into Fans

Brian Solis — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:32:13 +0000

Facebook Connect is connecting people across the social graph to fresh content and furthermore it’s channeling outside Web events into individual lifestreams. Essentially, Facebook is solidifying its position as not only your primary social network, it’s also a emerging as a central hub for your attention, updates, news, promotion, and enlightenment.

Now, Facebook is extending its network to the World Wide Web, allowing brands and personalities who have or will host Fan Pages to embed a widget version of the page directly into Web sites, other social networks, social networks, and blogs. This builds a bridge between the 200 million strong Facebook network and outside visitors to strategically concentrate on promotion and community building.

For example, here’s a sample widget for the Facebook Fan Page for my new book with Deirdre Breakenridge, “Putting the Public Back in Public Relations.”

Interactivity is key and by embedding the Facebook widget, site owners can augment, eliminate or reduce reliance on custom brand-building and attention grabbing site development while still amassing a significant following or fandom. It also extends the updates and content live, providing site visitors with the latest activity from inside the network to wherever the widget is placed. It’s a simple matter of adding a bit of automatically generated code to the site, not unlike how we embed YouTube videos or Flickr pictures today.

Visitors to outside branded pages can securely login with their Facebook credentials to interact with the widget to comment, become a fan, and view the latest pictures, videos, posts, etc. As fans participate, their activity is simultaneously shared within the Facebook community, further promoting the branded content within the personal “News Feed” for Facebook friends and contacts to potentially view and click through.

Here are a few examples of the Widget in action:

Lance Armstrong

BlackBerry

World Wildlife Fund

NPR

Kings of Leon

Lenny Kravitz

Roger Federer

Newsweek

ABC News

New Communication Theory and the New Roles for the New World of Marketing

admin — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 04:43:00 +0000

In the era of the “new” social Web, communications is actually evolving back to its origins of communicating with people, not at them. It may seem implied, but communications does not, for the most part, embody two-way discussions.

Over the years, communications has evolved into a one-way distribution channel that broadcasts messages at target audiences. In the process, communications stopped being about communication, focusing instead on the marketing aspects of top-down message push and control, what we now commonly refer to as marketing communications aka marcom. Marcom embodies traditional and new marketing branches that include advertising, PR, Web/interactive, event, among many other disciplines (depending on the organization).

With the soaring popularity and adoption of Social Media, companies are realizing that in addition to marketing communications, listening and engagement is quickly becoming pervasive and necessary in order to compete for precious, yet thinned and distributed attention. The days of focusing solely on Web stickiness, eyeballs and clickthroughs are fading. These are the days of immersion, conversations, engagement, relationships, referrals, and action.

So what do we call this important and history making transformation?

Some call it Social Media Marketing, others refer to it as Conversational Marketing, and factions of other thought leaders simply classify it as the socialization of the media and marketing in general.

In the world of marcom, we’re simply placing the communication back in communications. It’s the transformation of monologue to dialog, and it’s breaking down that walls and barriers that separate people from brands.

The problem with Social Media Marketing and Conversational Marketing as classifiers is that both still involve the word “marketing.” It doesn’t imply authenticity and the two-way process of listening, internalizing, and responding. Each is complementary to traditional marketing, but their intent, practice, and metrics are different. And, the socialization of communications is also unique.

Social Media Marketing is the use of social media tools to participate online in distinct people-powered communities. Conversational Marketing is first the understanding that markets are conversations and at the same time, conversations are also markets. The tools, channels, and approaches are different in this case, and actually span across advertising, marketing, SEO/search, widget marketing, word of mouth marketing (WOMM), among others – mostly. In the world of PR, Social Media Marketing, for the most part, concentrates on blogger relations and comment strategies. This is the practice of working with bloggers to retell your story and also sharing feedback and insight within comments that link back to something helpful to the community, while also benefiting the company you’re representing.

Again, the difference across each of these disciplines is the intent, execution, and results of any program.

But what’s transpiring now is so different, so revolutionary, that it deserves its own classification, for now, in order to advance within organizations and impact its soul and change its outlook and role within society.

For the first time in years, we’re seeking to adapt Harold Lasswell’s maxim as a means of describing the field of communication Theory, “who says what to whom in what channel with what effect.”

Factoring peoplenomics into the modified Communication Theory aka Social Theory equation, it now epitomizes, “who hears what, who says what to whom, in what channel, with what intent, and with what effect.”

The definitions and results will radically vary depending on how you mix and match those variables and which marketing or media discipline you represent.

It’s now the art and science of socializing _____ (fill in the blank.)

This is the era of our “Industrial Revolution:”

Towards the end of the 1990s, the Web, and its architects, forged the tools that would spark a renaissance of influence and empowerment. These tools would inspire people to build new interconnected platforms for content that would collectively and ultimately ignite a social revolution and usher a new exchange for information that has all the signs and economic potential of a modern day Industrial Revolution.

The socialization of media and information is our Industrial Revolution. For the first time in history, media technology and the tools and channels for broadcasting information has been disrupted and open for true global collaboration, while also effectively changing how people interact with each other.

The Social Revolution is the catalyst for the democratization of content and exchange of information, but we’re still experimenting and wrestling with the true impact of this change and how exactly these new models, on every side of the equation, will ultimately settle.

So, if we’re in the throes of a Social Revolution, does the act of socializing outbound communications require a new division within an organization?

Even though, Social Media is a stage in the overall evolution of marketing and media, and it will give way to something new and different.

In the meantime, what do we name this new division or discipline and is it simply an extension of the existing marketing department that already encompasses advertising, PR, marketing, Web, and new media? A rapidly growing list of organizations are hiring experts to lead the integration, with some earning titles of Social Media Officer and complementing existing Chief Marketing Officers.

Certainly there’s no shortage of genuine and purported Social Media Experts and Social Media Gurus. But what does that mean to be an expert, and more importantly, who’s truly qualified to socialize real world marketing departments with real world business demands, dependencies, infrastructure, opportunities and responsibilities?

The answer is, experience and the understanding of business and service dynamics and how the socialization of communications, development, and support impacts and benefits people and their peers. Period.

And, not the level of experience that one earns from talking about Social Media or simply participating in the newest networks.

Conversations don’t scale. Talk is cheap and action speaks louder than words.

It takes so much more than the ability listen and engage. It definitely encompasses much more than the ability to create profiles on every popular social platform and the process of befriending everyone across the networks. It’s the ability to identify meaningful conversations, comprehend them, determine those valuable enough to participate, and then feed that collective insight back into the organization (marketing, service, produce development, etc.) for positive change. It also requires the ability to uncover opportunities and crises to trendcast into proactive initiatives that prevent reactionary and defensive responses.

Proactive = relevancy.
Reactive = damage control.

As good friend Hugh MacLeod observed four years ago in The HughTrain, “There’s only one thing harder than starting a new business: Re-inventing an old one.”

Web and social tech expert Louis Gray calls Social Media Experts the “new” Webmasters. Social tools developer Greg Narain compares the current state of Social Media to the “e” in the old “e-conomy.” Early on, I predicted that we would eventually see Social Media Officers as the new Chief Marketing Officers.

They’re correct. And, what they share is the fact that these classifiers emerged to document important shifts, migrations, and growth stages of new mediums as well as the roles that further solidified them as catalysts for maturation.

Obviously, we’re in need for a new, important stepping stone in order to escalate to the next phase in influencer and customer interaction.

Brian Morissey wrote in a recent article for Adweek, that brands need a new kind of leader, claiming, “As conversations with customer matter more, brands seek social-media evangelists.”

So, which division within an organization is ready to fund this experimentation? Is it one division or is it an amalgamation of several departments?

So far, experience shows that it’s different depending on the company, and the champions within each.

Peter Kim, formerly an analyst for Forrester research, recently joined a startup to help large companies engage in social media. The company was funded with $50 million from Austin Ventures was created by Razorfish founder Jeff Dachis.

Chris Brogan, one of the most vocal authorities on Social Media, advises traditional businesses, organizations and individuals on how to use social media and social networks to build relationships and deliver value.

Deborah Schultz, a social web strategist and marketing innovator, was tasked with creating a lab to explore new business and marketing models for consumer powerhouse Proctor & Gamble.

Scott Monty, a marketing expert, was recently hired to socialize the Ford brand.

Dan Schawbel, a personal branding evangelist, is the first Social Media Specialist at EMC.

Jackie Peters, an interactive and social Web marketing authority is helping Sun socialize its Startup Essentials program

Shel Holtz, a PR pro, is assisting Coca Cola and other consumer brands into Social worlds.

Connie Bensen, a community relations expert, is the Community Manager for Network Solutions.

Chris Heuer, a Web and New Media visionary, is currently guiding Intel Corporation on best practices and new opportunities for Social strategies. The company also tapped several social activists, including yours truly, to advise the company on Social Media.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, a thought leading blogger in the Web 2.0 landscape, actively publishes stories related to how companies can or can not benefit from community managers, those charged with listening to the conversations fueling relevant social networks and coordinating necessary responses and change – outbound and internally.

Personally, I’ve received calls from major beverage, auto, medical, green, aerospace, and entertainment brands, asking advice and seeking referrals for an internal Social champion and expert – all with the last few weeks.

The list goes on and on. These stories are only the representative few of a bigger shift within existing marketing departments as they attempt to socialize their brands.

These are the times when the social revolution is redefining how we not only communicate with our constituents, but how we as a collective organization of people, process the information, intelligence and insight garnered from external conversations to more effectively and genuinely participate.

But, Social Media isn’t limited to marketing or outbound activity. Social Media benefits and develops every department within an organization. And it’s for this reason, that its future and its effectiveness depends on its champions, participants, analysts, and opportunists.
The intelligence that is collected during the process of listening and observation affects everything. We can improve our products and services based on the real world input and feedback from a true, vested public focus group. We can improve and tailor our story specifically to the assemblies of people we’re hoping to reach in a way that’s convincing and accurate. We can enhance our inbound customer service practices to transform cost centers into customer investments. In the process, we’re humanizing our brands and transforming customers into evangelists, people into storytellers, and brands into resource centers.

We’re connecting brands, and the people representing them to new groups of important people, in the places where they discover and share new content and in turn, interact with each other.

This is the latest incarnation of digital communications and for the moment, it takes us back to the foundation of relationships that started everything – this time however, it’s not only the tools that have changed, it’s the realization that people matter to everything we do.

It’s the socialization of:

Communications
Advertising
PR
Customer Service
Product Development
Interactive
Sales

Whatever discipline you represent, you are the champion for the socialization of that branch as it relates to the greater good of the company, brand, and stakeholders. Only you can specifically understand how Social strategies affect and complement the day-to-day campaigns that are already working well for your organization.

Ultimately, social initiatives will be implemented and deployed independently by each department, working with a social coordinator such as a Community Manager or Social Media Mangaer in conjunction with a CMO, VP of marketing or even a Chief Social Officer. Everything depends on the existing infratructure and social-savvy of the organization. However, it won’t always be simply rooted in Social strategies. As the communications landscape evolves, business will always be influenced by new and interactive media. The landscape of communicatins and the tools used to connect people and stories will continue to evolve. Remember, this is about the sociology of Social Media. Technology changes, people don’t.

Just wait until you see how semantic platforms will change the dynamics of information discovery, creation, and connectivity.

In the meantime, the future of your business hinges on the ability for champions to arise, implement, and justify the socialization of your company’s ability to listen, empathize, respond, advise, and evolve based on the online discussions that are currently taking place with or without you.

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