Social Media Catalyst

Skype’s new owners might make it the platform it always should have been.
On the list of technology companies that inspire speculation and interest disproportionate to their size, Skype has often been near the top. The international success of its Internet-calling service was near-instant.

In ebay’s hands, however, Skype never quite achieved its promise. After spending $3.1 billion to buy it, eBay today sold off control to a group of technology investors for $1.9 billion in a deal that values Skype at about $2.75 billion. Not by any means small change but not the outlandish success that was once expected of Skype—and that it could have been.

Eighteen or 24 months ago, if you were asked to name the most important social networking platform, “Skype” would have been a very good, if unexpected, answer. Skype had passed 200 million user accounts way back in early 2007. It had 30 million or so users a day. The total time spent with Skype a year and a half ago was about 10 billion minutes a month already well behind Facebook’s 20 billion but not so far that it could never catch up.

Skype is not, of course, a “social networking” tool as the term is generally used. But it unquestionably involves social interaction. And one advantage that Skype had over social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace was that Skype had persuaded many millions of people to download its software—something very few companies have been able to do.

Today a comparison like this would be completely academic. Measured by the number of users a day or the time they spend with it, Facebook has left Skype far in the dust. And while Zuckerberg’s gutsy decision to turn down Yahoo‘s (YHOO) reported $1 billion bid for Facebook looks brilliant, eBay is happy to have wound up with a smaller loss than most analysts expected.

When eBay bought Skype, the talk was about Skype’s synergies with eBay’s marketplace, and lots of folks thought that eBay’s purchase meant that Skype would transform how eBayers did business. As social networks gained traction, Skype, with its powerful client software and enormous user base, seemed well-positioned to jump into the pool. But Skype didn’t go in this direction. Instead, Skype has chugged along, steadily building its business, but never getting to a big transformative moment.

Blogs, forums and wikis are all tools that can help companies reach out to customers and boost business.

Social-networking tools aren’t just for Facebook fanatics anymore. These days, consumers are demanding a higher degree of interactivity from customer-service departments. As a result, companies are being challenged to add online capabilities to their CRM systems.

Take, for example, today’s social-networking technologies. By building a product-centric social network that encourages visitors to swap information and connect with other like-minded individuals, a company can gather crucial customer contact information and build a virtual community.

Then there is the blogging phenomenon. For marketing, blogs work great to build brand equity and familiarity. Whether introduced as part of an existing product site or as a dedicated minisite for a particular product, a blog can serve as a casual and conversational approach to addressing consumer concerns and building product loyalty.

Companies can also use wikis to enhance customer relations. A wiki is a Web site that allows users to freely create and edit content using any Web browser — without requiring HTML or other technical skills. “Wikis can be a cheap way to maintain a product Web site for both marketing and for service,” said Hickernell. Not to mention the value-add capabilities of wiki technology. For example, a food manufacturer can easily create a wiki-based Web site that allows customers to contribute to a recipe database.

DISCUSS AMONGST YOURSELVES
Discussion forums“are good for building customer communities around products and brands. More than simply a destination for consumers to swap product information and tips, a discussion forum can be used to generate buzz around a product or service without a multimillion-dollar advertising budget. The right discussion forum can even increase sales revenue. Consumers are willing to pay 20 percent more for a service that received an “excellent” rating from fellow consumers than they are for the same service that received a “good” rating. And respondents said that reviews generated by consumers had a greater influence than those written by professionals.

But while online tools can engender a sense of community and brand loyalty among consumers, there is also a downside. For starters, you do need to have strong moderation when you offer user-support forums to make sure bad discussion threads are removed immediately. After all, foul language, racist comments and unflattering product reviews can “be very detrimental” to a company’s customer relations, sales and image.

Mobile phones have become the ubiquitous gadget which is like a shadow with all of us. As techno logy is improving and we are going from 3G to 4G especially in the developed world, mobile are increasingly used for social networking.

Recently, Advertising Age reported on the 400% surge in mobile video uploads to YouTube, attributed to the new iPhone 3GS. Beyond the implications of what that may mean for the value of ad inventory on YouTube, one thing is apparent: There is an inseparable link between social media and mobile devices.

As the capabilities of these devices expand, we can expect that updating social-network sites via mobile will continue to increase and may eventually even surpass the wired web. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are remarkably dependent on mobile access for the value they provide to their users. Many may also argue that mobile status updates are, by their very nature, timelier, more relevant and potentially more interesting to their readers.

Every major social network offers its users a range of mobile services, from mobile web access to downloadable mobile applications. Although consumers with high-end devices may be the primary users of these mobile services, some social networks also offer a number of SMS-driven features that allow consumers to stay engaged by text, even on low-end mobile phones. This represents a big opportunity for brands to maximize their efforts and move consumers easily between their mobile and social media experiences.

While social media campaigns are becoming more common, we often see that when agencies and brands begin their engagement with social networks, they act as if their entire audience is on a computer — the mobile aspects of social media are frequently neglected. And the reverse can also be said about many brands’ initial mobile marketing efforts: They often neglect to effectively integrate the power of mobile social-media elements (even when these elements already exist) to further engage consumers and fans of the brand.

Looking Glass, the social media aggregator from Microsoft was opened up for beta testing in January 2009. The Windows team and put in place a load-balancing plan, meant to control the number of downloads that could happen at a time so the system wouldn’t crash, and opened up the beta-testing download period on a Friday at 9 a.m. By 9:30 a.m. a popular tech blogger had posted a way to bypass the load-balancing system and the operating system crashed under the weight.

Tweeting to the angst-ridden:

By monitoring the conversation we realized because we said there would be limited downloads, it created this angst said a Microsoft member working on the same. Microsoft reached out to the angst-ridden beta testers, asking them to watch its Twitter feed, and by Saturday morning it had alerted them the system was back up. Within 30 minutes it got another tweet — that that downloads wasn’t compatible with a certain browser. From Looking Glass team used the tweet to file a high-priority bug and it was fixed within the hour.

While the tool is meant to be open and work with a variety for third-party social-media vendors and platforms, it’s still meant to tie into and drive sales for Microsoft’s Enterprise Group, meaning that its use could be limited for companies that don’t use a suite of Microsoft products. It purposely built something that requires multiple Microsoft teams — ad sales and enterprise sales — to do. It seems the only way for Microsoft to win this youthful battle.

It also gives Microsoft ad sales reps something more to talk about than banner and search ads.

Microsoft wants to change the expectation advertisers have of Microsoft. Microsoft can do more than sell you advertising. It can help your business problems – it is a bunch of geeks, let’s see what the geeks can do.

Individual-level Density
The degree a respondent’s ties know one another/ proportion of ties among an individual’s nominees. Network or global-level density is the proportion of ties in a network relative to the total number possible (sparse versus dense networks).

Flow betweenness centrality
The degree that a node contributes to sum of maximum flow between all pairs of nodes (not that node).

Eigenvector centrality
A measure of the importance of a node in a network. It assigns relative scores to all nodes in the network based on the principle that connections to nodes having a high score contribute more to the score of the node in question.

Local Bridge
An edge is a local bridge if its endpoints share no common neighbors. Unlike a bridge, a local bridge is contained in a cycle.

Path Length
The distances between pairs of nodes in the network. Average path-length is the average of these distances between all pairs of nodes.

Prestige
In a directed graph prestige is the term used to describe a node’s centrality. “Degree Prestige”, “Proximity Prestige”, and “Status Prestige” are all measures of Prestige.

Radiality
Degree an individual’s network reaches out into the network and provides novel information and influence.

Reach
The degree any member of a network can reach other members of the network.
Structural cohesion. The minimum number of members who, if removed from a group, would disconnect the group.

Structural equivalence
Refers to the extent to which nodes have a common set of linkages to other nodes in the system. The nodes don’t need to have any ties to each other to be structurally equivalent.
Structural hole Static holes that can be strategically filled by connecting one or more links to link together other points. Linked to ideas of social capital: if you link to two people who are not linked you can control their communication.

A matrix-like character which does bombastic dance moves in a viral video is actually an advertisement for a car company. A laugh-out-loud funny clip of a baby making funny noises is a marketing technique for a new infant foods manufacturing company.

These are just a couple of examples of how search engine optimization or SEO marketing techniques work through video marketing.

With the popularity of Youtube and social networking sites, it is no wonder why both old and new companies are switching tactics when it comes to how they perform search engine optimization and SEO marketing. Both of these SEO marketing techniques are done with the help of video website promotion, video marketing, SEO video marketing and video optimization.

SEO Video Marketing: The Basics
To have a deeper understanding of how SEO video marketing can be your primary means of search engine optimization, here are a few points that you need to keep in mind:

Instead of link building, traditional bookmarking and other techniques offered by companies offering SEO services, video marketing is slowly taking over the Internet. Online users have a much more positive response towards videos, so video website promotion is the best way to reach out to your core audience.

If you want to apply video website promotion for your website/ blog, you need to learn about the techniques of video optimization. You can perform the video optimization yourself or you can hire a company offering SEO services to do it for you. To have a head start in your SEO video marketing, what you can do is upload videos in popular sites like YouTube, and repost the links on blogs, forums and your website.

Bookmarking a video and having a press release are the other techniques that you can use when using videos to optimize your site for the search engines. In this way you can start promotion work for your website and can derive more & more traffics towards the site.

Twitter has suddenly become a rage in the social networking world. Starting a blog is easy but putting up a post on it seems difficult. Even more difficult to make sure that people read it and for that it has to be interesting. If you are not a celebrity, it is remotely possible that your every day would be eventful. Then what could you write on your blog. Micro-blogging comes to your rescue. Twitter has helped people in that.

Thus what is that that people use twitter for:

1. Keeping I touch with friends
2. Updating your status message
3. Find news
4. for search
5. for fun

Twitter has helped people be aware of what is happening with the lives of their friends and business colleagues. Celebrities are using it as a PR exercise to make people understand what a celebrity’s life is like.

Twitter is indeed Value-Adding, but not ultimately disruptive

Twitter is similar to the user “Status” features on Facebook. Many features and notifications on Facebook are able to be extended to mobile devices. Even though Status isn’t among that group, it could be. If Facebook were to extend Status to mobile devices it would duplicate the functionality of Twitter within the context of a more robust social networking platform and give it an instant user group of 18 million people.

I bring up Facebook because Twitter faces a wall in the adoption curve between early adopters and the early majority. The appeal of Twitter isn’t disruptive enough to convince mainstream technology users to adopt it. It is limited to the demographic of tech enthusiasts who already use Web 2.0 tools and services.

Twitter’s biggest contribution to the development of social technology will not be its widespread adoption, but rather its demonstration of the value and nuances of persistent presence. The lessons learned from a case study of Twitter can be applied, implemented, observed in other social platforms already in widespread use like Facebook; Myspace etc

The principles of Twitter will surely be absorbed by other platforms.

A six year analysis of Internet Activity Index was conducted. Can you guess which of the five areas (Commerce, Communications, Community, Content and Search) has grown the most—and which has shrunk?
The most surprising results actually aren’t in Community and Communications. Yes, email (i.e. Communications is down), the only area to fall over those six years. And Community is up, largely because it wasn’t being tracked in 2003.

No, the big winner here looks to be content sites and search. Percentage wise, search has actually grown the most, with a 111% increase in time spent on site over the 2003 numbers—but the raw numbers aren’t nearly so impressive.

Note, too, that total Internet time has increased 59% in those three years. Content sites now receive the most time on site (over half total Internet time), but communications is still the No. 2 activity. Community sites get one sixth of our online time.

I find the label “Communications” versus “Community” interesting. Most people, I find, are on community sites to communicate—whether with one friend or as many people as possible. Taken that way, the combined total time on those categories is 7 hours and 55 minutes—which beats content sites.

What do you think? Have you seen a decrease in communications and email, or do you think that’s kind of a false distinction from community sites? The point I feel thought is that you cannot compare email to social networking since they do not do the same jobs. The most important thing which makes email a winner over social networking is that attachments cannot be transferred over social network sites.

Building a social media presence is much more a marathon than a sprint. There’s plenty of content to develop, place and promote, and there are lots of relationships to build. The social media marathon requires commitment, persistence and lots of patience, the type of mental endurance needed to complete a 42 km race.
Commit to do whatever is necessary to succeed, and pace you, so that you don’t injure yourself or get burned out during the process. This principle is behind most great achievements.

“Start off slow and taper down.” Bob’s mantra counters our natural tendency to come “out of the gate” at full speed and keep running — our human egos at work. How does all this translate into long-term social media success?

Here are seven ideas to help you develop the mindset of a marathoner:

1. Make a serious commitment to do whatever is required to attain your social media or web marketing goals. This is an absolute prerequisite.

2. Get yourself a mentor. As I now like to say, “The ultimate shortcut is doing it right the first time.”

3. Don’t wait until the conditions are perfect for launching your campaign. I’ll always remember what some one said, “You don’t have to get it right. You just have to get it going”.

4. Join one business networking site at a time and take the time to master it. Social networking sites can be intimidating at first. Learn a new feature, practice it, and go on to the next.

5. Start out blogging once a week. It’s hard to begin, especially if, like me, you’re not a professional writer. You can increase your posting frequency later.

6. Realize that there’s a steep social media learning curve. Do not quit. So many people join Twitter or Facebook or begin blogging and quit shortly thereafter.

7. Don’t forget about the “social” in social media. Get to know a lot of people and have a blast!

1. Engage the reader. Ask him questions about his business. Show interest in them, and they will show interest in you.

2. be gracious. Thank them for being a follower. Thank them for friend-requesting you. Always say thank you.

3. Reciprocate. Return the tweet by commenting on one of their tweets or blog posts. Tell them you like their site, their profile picture, etc. Say it and mean it.

4. Create Passion. Write and link to content that not only will interest the readers, but will also interest you. Readers can tell when you’re writing about something that you’re mildly interested in and something that you have a passion for.

Being a part of a social site needn’t be about who ate lunch where or an outline of your daily habits because that is what is happening with twitter. Add value to your pages and keep the readers coming back for more by giving them that value. Write about interesting topics. Write about unusual practices. Blog about changes in your company’s industry. Blog about blogging and how it has helped you online.

Whatever you find that adds value to your online presence, use it to its maximum and your readers will fill in the rest of the puzzle. Build it and they will come