Living Networks – Chapter 6: Network Presence – Harnessing the Flow of Marketing, Customer Feedback, and Knowledge

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Download Chapter 6 of Living Networks on Network Presence

Every chapter of Living Networks is being released on this blog as a free download, together with commentary and updated perspectives since its original publication in 2002.

For the full Table of Contents and free chapter downloads see the Living Networks website or the Book Launch/ Preface to the Anniversary Edition.

Living Networks – Chapter 6: Network Presence

Harnessing the Flow of Marketing, Customer Feedback, and Knowledge

OVERVIEW: Today, your company’s success depends on how well it builds its network presence in three key domains:

• Marketing, which is now mainly about influencing the flow of messages through consumer networks;

• Customer feedback loops, that tightly link a company and its customers, enabling them together to constantly create more value;

• Work processes and knowledge, that flow through the networks of workers within and beyond the firm.

The idea of the ‘network presence’ of organizations is still very relevant today. Still today not many companies truly have a strong presence in the social networks of consumers and customers, even though much progress has been made over the last five years.

The first space, where there probably has been the most movement so far, is in marketing. Marketing using social network approaches is now mainstream, though a nascent idea back in 2002. I opened with the example of the online marketing for Lord of the Rings, which took advantage of the strong social cohesion of the book’s fan base. While the concept of the ‘meme’ seems to have lost traction over the last years, I still think it is enormously relevant. I wrote:

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Four great visual representations of the social media and Web 2.0 landscape

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People often ask me how I keep track of everything that’s going on in Web 2.0 and social media and make sense of it all. The most important single tool for me is creating frameworks. The many frameworks I create (e.g. Future of Media Lifecycle, Future of Media Strategy, Trend Map 2007+ (with Richard Watson) etc. etc.) are all primarily to help me organize in my mind what’s going on. They then allow me to readily understand new developments as they emerge and how they fit into the landscape.

The release of the Conversation Prism last week made me think it’s worth providing a quick review of visual frameworks for the social media landscape.

The Conversation Prism is intended to evolve over time based on changes in both companies andchannels, which is a great idea, given the other landscapes below are static, and my framework in particular is ageing and needs rework. Another cool idea would be to provide animated frameworks that show the development and disappearance of different companies over time.

Recently I have been trying to make sense of some of the recent changes in the landscape, particularly about how the primary platform is shifting from the social network to distributed conversation. Even before the Conversation Prism came out I had decided to work on a new framework that will incorporate my latest thinking on this – hopefully out in the next couple of months!

Here are the four most interesting landscapes of companies in the social media world that I’ve come across.

Conversation Prism (August 2008) – Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas.

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New LinkedIn deals – LexisNexis and Xobni – extend the reach of professional social networks

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After the news of the deal between LinkedIn and New York Times I wrote about a couple of days ago, LinkedIn has just announced new deals with LexisNexis and Outlook plug-in Xobni.

The LexisNexis deal is particularly intriguing. Back in 2003 a number of corporate social networking applications were launched, notably Spoke, VisiblePath, and Contact Network Corporation. I knew all the players well, and Spoke was in fact the Gold Sponsor of the Living Networks Forum I ran in New York in December 2003. At the time there was one other significant player which was in a similar space, which was InterAction CRM software, owned by Interface. The CRM software was primarily sold to legal firms, where it had a strong presence. Its functionality included a “who knows whom” function, so that lawyers could find out who in their firm knew people at client or prospect firms. As with all the other corporate social networking applications, this included a high degree of user choice on what personal contact information was made available.

In December 2004 LexisNexis, the largest provider of legal information, acquired Interface, making InterAction CRM part of its suite of offerings. Since then LexisNexis has very actively acquired software companies, notably VisualFiles in case management, Juris in pratice management, and Axxia in backoffice legal solutions, repositioning itself far beyond being an information provider.

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How will news and social networks be integrated?

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It is inevitable that news dissemination will become a largely social function. By whatever means, we will be provided with extremely low touch ways of sharing content we think would be interesting to specific people we know. This will then be filtered in various ways by the recipients, however most will value being recommended articles and sites on an individual basis.

Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and other tools allow us to recommend content to the world at large. But recommendations are far more valuable if they are specific to the person and context. The best way to disseminate these recommendations is through our social networks, if we happen to spend time there. So social networks can become a platform for the collaborative filtering of content, giving individuals the benefit of their network’s judgment and access to information.

In this context, the announcement today by New York Times and LinkedIn of a way of providing custom content and recommendations to their network is a landmark. Over the next few years this integration of social networks and content will rapidly evolve to be a very important part of the landscape.

linkedinnyt.jpg

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Interview on SkyBusiness: Facebook And Other Social Networking Sites Can Be Beneficial For Corporations

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Here is an old (November 2, 2007) interview I did on SkyBusiness about social networks, examining both the industry landscape and how social networks can be valuable inside organizations. What I like best about this is that for much of the interview they had up a banner reading “Facebook And Other Social Networking Sites Can Be Beneficial For Corporations”, a message that business audiences, especially at the time, hadn’t heard much before.

Some of the things I discuss in the interview:

* The role of advertising networks in social networks

* The upcoming launch of Google’s Open Social and what it means for the sector

* The value to organizations of encouraging strong social networks

* Examples of companies using Facebook and other social networks internally

* How Enterprise 2.0 takes social media tools to apply to organizational productivity

Social networks open out – celebrating the last year’s change but “lots more work to be done”

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In the last two days MySpace has announced Data Availability and Facebook launched Facebook Connect, while Google is due to announce “Friend Connect” on Monday, according to TechCrunch. MySpace and Facebook are providing ways to open out users’ access to their data on those social networks. TechCrunch says that Google’s initiative may not be quite as open as the other initiatives, in that it will require data to be accessed directly from their servers each time rather than being able to be downloaded and manipulated (under strict terms of service), However Open Social, which Google’s initiative is based on, is being used by most of the major social networks other than Facebook, making Friend Connect potentially broader in scope, as long as the social networks supporting Open Social choose to use the new offering.

I wrote last year about how the dominant platform in technology is shifting to social networks, and the inexorable trend to openness in social networks. It turns out the MySpace and Facebook announcements may not be quite all they seem. Chris Saad of the DataPortability Working Group writes:

Both moves have rightly been attributed as ‘Data Portability’ plays – but neither of them are true ‘DataPortability’ implementations… yet.

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Mobile social networking, meaning virtual networks bringing people physically together, will inevitably be a pervasive application

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Michael Arrington on Techcrunch has just written an article titled I Saw the Future of Social Networking the Other Day, referring to an unnamed start-up that has a mobile social network that runs on iPhone. Arrington writes:

A few years from now we’ll use our mobile devices to help us remember details of people we know, but not well. And it will help us meet new people for dating, business and friendship. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting – quick LinkedIn-type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.

None of this is new. I wrote about proximity dating in my 2002 book Living Networks and on this blog in early 2003, at the time referring to Imahima, an early player in this space in Japan. In 2005 I wrote about the next phase of mobile social network players including Dodgeball (bought by Google, who did nothing with them) and Meetro, and over the last couple of years I was interviewed on mobile social networking by a number of publications, including one piece in 2006 on What accelerates – and slows – the development of social networking mobile platforms.

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Do social network technologies make us better or worse off as a society?

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The Freakonomics blog, which is now part of the New York Times online, asks the following question of six prominent academics and participants in the space:

Has social networking technology (blog-friendly phones, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) made us better or worse off as a society, either from an economic, psychological, or sociological perspective?

The responses to this ‘Freakonomics quorum’ are well worth a read, with many thought-provoking perspectives.

It’s a question that in various forms is very prominent in people’s conversations today, either in excitement at the possibilities, or concern at evils ranging from distraction to dehumanization.

My view has always been that any change holds potential positives and negatives, so we must work hard to accentuate what could be good, and contain the things that could be bad. However as social animals, any new communication form enables new possibilities to express what I have described as our ‘latent humanity’.

Social networking technologies have been abused in major and minor everyday ways, and will continue to be so, particularly as we all work out what they mean and how it’s useful to us to use them. Far outweighing that is the potential for us to connect in new ways, to bring together people and ideas across the globe in ways we are still only dreaming about, to enable wonderful connections that never would have been possible otherwise. On the way, it is up to us to find out how we can make the most good come from these new tools.

Why online reputation systems have a long way to go

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eBay will eliminate negative rankings from May, according to the BBC. This makes what was barely useful into something practically useless.

It’s interesting that when you talk about reputation systems, most people refer to eBay’s feedback and ratings system. It was in fact clear years ago that eBay’s ratings had very little value. The essence of the problem was that there was no incentive to rate people poorly. Since buyers and sellers rate each other, any negative rating can – and often is – reciprocated with another negative rating. However a positive rating is also likely to be reciprocated. Because anyone with any experience on eBay well understands this, almost no-one gives negative ratings, so there is very little correlation between eBay ratings and how good a trading partner people actually are.

Now eBay has recognized this publicly, rather than pretending that its ratings are valid, and is explicitly pointing to users’ retaliation to negative reviews. The BBC article says that eBay says that there are other mechanisms to protect users:

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How to make Facebook secure for organizational use: no more excuses!

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I have written and being interviewed many times in the last few months on the use of Facebook in organizations.

There are a range of reasons why Facebook is often being blocked inside organizations. In many cases it’s because it’s viewed as a time-waster. However in other cases the concern is more about information loss – competitors finding out who is working for your organization and potentially sensitive information.

Worklight has just released a Facebook application called Workbook, reports Dan Farber, which authenticates users with an organization’s identity systems, and enables closed communication within the Workbook application between Facebook users. In one step Facebook can become an enterprise application, including proprietary discussions.

The application is expected for general release in February. For now it is being trialled in three large institutions, including a global retail bank with 70,000 staff that had received loud complaints from staff when it banned Facebook, and an investment bank that tried to implement an in-house social network based on Sharepoint that its employees didn’t use. The intention is to use Facebook not just internally, but also with clients and fund managers. As I’ve written before, one of the key issues with banning Facebook is that it makes it harder to attract and retain young, talented workers.

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