Making business sense of social media

Chris Brogan: Making Business Sense of Social Media.

April 7, 2008 at 10:39 PM in Business use, Social-media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

LinkedIn now offering corporate profiles

San Francisco Chronicle: LinkedIn now offering corporate profiles.

Yahoo employees tend to land at rival Google for their next job. The median age for Facebook employees is 27. And Hewlett-Packard draws as many graduates from Bangalore University in India as it does from San Jose State and Stanford.

In a new feature introduced today, LinkedIn, the Mountain View professional social networking site, has produced 160,000 corporate profiles, from Microsoft Corp. to Apple Inc., detailing information such as common career paths, top schools and popular employees for each company.

The corporate profiles draw on data culled from and supplied by its 20 million users, who list their employer, title, work history and other personal details in their profile. ...

March 21, 2008 at 02:42 PM in Business use, Social networks | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Social media: Talk is cheap for businesses

New essay by Chris Brogan: Social media — talk is cheap for businesses. Chris talks about the new social media tools, including video, blogs, wikis, Twitter, Utterz, Ning, et al., and how they can be useful for business.

March 21, 2008 at 12:00 AM in Business use, Social-media | Permalink | Comments (2) | | (0)

10 social media interview questions to ask candidates.

From SocialMediaHeadhunter: 10 Social Media Interview Questions To Ask Prospective Employees.

March 20, 2008 at 01:02 AM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (0)

Employers must learn to love social media

Management Issues: Employers must learn to love social media.

Instead of trying to crack down on workers' use of new social media and Web 2.0 technology, employers should be embracing it as a way of creating better workplace communities, engagement and communication.

Research by consultancy Watson Wyatt has argued employers are missing a trick when it comes to using social media technology and, used effectively, it has the potential to be a key tool in promoting employee engagement. ...

March 12, 2008 at 09:18 PM in Business use, Social-media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Welcome to Conference 2.0

Dan Fost in Fortune magazine: Welcome to Conference 2.0. Social media is putting an end to the passive role attendees traditionally play at business gatherings.

March 11, 2008 at 09:39 PM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

What businesses need to know about social media

NYU media scholar Clay Shirky at his new book site on What businesses need to know about social media.

March 9, 2008 at 02:16 PM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Social media: How to sell it to your team

The Journal: Social Media: How to 'Sell It' to Your Team.

Don’t think that social media only includes social networks; they are only one bucket of social media; forums, blogs, wikis, aggregators (collections of blogs), podcasts, vodcasts and microformats (machine-readable media) are other often-overlooked forms of social media that should be considered when making initial forays into social media. ...

February 21, 2008 at 11:00 PM in Business use, Social-media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Social media will change your business

BusinessWeek Online: Social Media Will Change Your Business. 'Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up … or catch you later.' Excerpt:

Blogs were the heart of the story in 2005. But they're just one of the tools millions can use today to lift their voices in electronic communities and create their own media. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, video sites like YouTube, mini blog engines like Twitter—they've all emerged in the last three years, and all are nourished by users. Social Media: It's clunkier language than blogs, but we're not putting it on the cover anyway. We're just fixing it. ...

A good primer for business executives just starting out in social media.

February 21, 2008 at 09:07 PM in Business use, Social-media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Fear not the empowered customer

Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li of Forrester Research in the MIT Sloan Management Review: Harnessing the Power of Social Applications. YouTube, FaceBook and other social apps can hurt a company-or help it succeed. People are connecting with one another in increasing numbers, thanks to blogs, social networking sites and countless communities across the Web. Some companies are learning to turn this growing groundswell to their advantage.

February 15, 2008 at 12:34 AM in Business use, Social networks, Social-media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

'Social media to rock the web in 2008'

Channelweb.co.uk: Social media to rock the web in 2008, the year when social media means business.

2007 was widely touted as the year of social media, but analysts expect to see changes this year in the way social media is used and an increase in its effect on business.

The advent of the social web has created such online interaction between consumers that traditional models to research a product or service will change fundamentally. ...

February 3, 2008 at 12:26 AM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

14 social media and social networking trends for 2008

Smart Mobs surfaces 14 social media and social networking trends for 2008. Putting on my business hat for a moment, I particularly agree with this one:

The major corporations will replace the outdated intranet systems and will build better communication with employees by making use of social media on customizable, scalable and feature-rich platforms;

At least, several of the smarter, forward-looking corporations interested in fostering wider, deeper conversations will.

January 7, 2008 at 12:44 AM in Business use, Social-media | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (0)

Weaving social media into your company's culture

siteVisibility: How to Weave a Social Media into the Fabric of your Company.

And Brian Solis at PR 2.0 on social media marketing campaigns.

December 23, 2007 at 01:00 AM in Business use, Social-media | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

How social media affects influence patterns

Business Wire: New Influencer Study Initial Findings Shared At Society for New Communications Research Symposium.

Fifty-seven percent of respondents said that social media tools are becoming more valuable to their activities as more customers and influencers use them. Twenty-seven percent reported that social media is a core element of their communications strategy. Only three percent stated that social media has little or no value to their communications initiatives. Respondents believe that social media is most effective for the following sectors: arts, entertainment and recreation; communications; computer hardware; and education.

"Blogs, podcasts, and social networks are changing the way we think about media and influence," said Jen McClure, executive director of the Society. "We wanted to learn what criteria communications professionals use to define new influencers; how social media is being used to communicate with these influentials; and how to measure the effects of such efforts. The ultimate goal of the study is to offer a set of recommendations to the PR profession."

Respondents reported that the most effective tools for their social media initiatives are currently:

• Blogs
  
• Online video
  
• Social networks

The top three criteria for determining the relevance and potential influence of a blogger or podcaster are:

• Quality of content on the blog or podcast
• Relevance of content to the company or brand
• Search engine rankings

December 7, 2007 at 11:50 PM in Business use, Social-media | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (0)

Social media for business

At Alphablogs, isabella takes notes during an online seminar with  Seth Godin, Steve Mann and Jeremiah Owyang, talking social media for business

Diva Marketing Blog: 12 Tips To Creating Social Media Communities.

And B.L. Ochman, a marketing friend, sorts out some of the experts who've done social media consulting for corporations. 

December 7, 2007 at 11:37 PM in Business use, Social-media | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (0)

Study: Charities use social media more than businesses

Computerworld: Study: Charities use social media more than businesses. UMass research finds that large charities make strong use of blogs, online video and other Web 2.0 tools

Compassion in Politics blog: Revolution Now: Social media meets nonprofits.

November 29, 2007 at 11:40 PM in Business use, Social-media | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (0)

Facebook will change the workplace. Or it won't

Charlene Li at Harvard Business Review: Why Your Company Needs To Be on Facebook.

Don’t write off social networking sites as merely social playgrounds for the young. Your customers, prospects, and employees are exploring and extending their relationships there. Some of you will be bolder in creating business value in these networks while others will wait for the pioneers to carve out the paths. But ignore these new communities only if you believe your customers are not there – and there are few instances where this will be the case.

Tom Davenport at Harvard Business Review: Why Facebook and MySpace Won't Change the Workplace.

November 29, 2007 at 12:11 AM in Business use, Social networks | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Why your company needs to be on Facebook

Charlene Li at the Harvard Business blog: Why Your Company Needs To Be on Facebook.

November 13, 2007 at 10:05 PM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Social media in the enterprise

Shannon Whitley: Social media in the enterprise. Excerpt:

Why would an enterprise want to use Twitter?  While Twitter is very convenient, it’s not what I’d call a robust or sophisticated application.  Certainly it would be nice to have access to simple chat functionality, but I think it can be implemented much better than it has been done through Twitter.  For a lot of social media tools, the only reason we use them is because they’ve reached critical mass with our peer groups.  Starting from scratch in an enterprise, you don’t have to worry about the acceptance of your software solutions.  You can pick a superior application with Twitter-esque features that is actually better than the consumer version. ...

October 24, 2007 at 10:41 PM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0)

Social networks in the office

Heather Green at BusinessWeek Online: In-House Social Networks. With a nod to Facebook, large companies now have the virtual equivalent of the water cooler on the Web.

Corporations are being nudged along by employees, and not just the digital-savvy Generation Y that's now entering the workforce. More 30-plus employees are signing up with Facebook to trade daily updates with colleagues and friends. They're also building lists of contacts from among the 13 million professionals on LinkedIn. At Ernst & Young alone, 11,000 workers now have Facebook accounts.

Everyone from IBM to Microsoft and on down to startups like intro Net-works, Awareness Inc., and Jive Software, are offering applications and services. One company, SelectMinds, has created social networks for 60 companies, including Lockheed Martin and JPMorgan Chase.

And SharePoint, the Microsoft software that lets companies set up MySpace-like profiles, blogs, and collaborative Web sites known as wikis within the confines of their firewalls, is one of the fastest-growing server products in the company's history. "At first people were slow to adopt this; they were nervous. But now we're seeing a bunch of adoption," says Rob Curry, director of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server software. ...

September 24, 2007 at 08:02 PM in Business use, Social networks | Permalink | Comments (0)

Get your company's message out with a company blog

SFGate: Company blog can be a great way to get your message out.

Here are 10 things to consider before beginning your blog.

-- Determine what you have to offer. 

-- Decide whether your blog will be a marketing tool. 

-- Define your editorial vision.

-- Consider the content. 

-- Share your thought leadership. 

-- Be a credible source. 

-- Decide who will be the writer. 

-- Choose your partnerships wisely. 

-- Learn how to engage your readers. 

--  Know what matters to your readers.

September 13, 2007 at 11:11 PM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0)

Report from Office 2.0

The wi-fi at the second annual Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco today was spotty, so I'm able to post this only now. I attended for the second straight year.

Here are some photos. And here are some highlights:

All the registrants received a free iPhone -- pretty cool. (I didn't because I'm a member of the press.) Spotted Julia French, Stowe Boyd, Buzz Bruggeman, Brian Solis, Tom Foremski, Kaliya Hamlin and other familiar faces.

From this morning: A look back at the success of the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Great Britain last November. Mash-ups, wikis, podcasts and blogathons were among the key sessions. The site is still getting a thousand visits a week nearly a year later.

Some websites mentioned during the day:

Slideshare.net

Cogenz

Wikipatterns

Turnitin, the website that enables teachers to spot plagiarism

Library 2.0, a social network for librarians, using the open-source Ning platform

Notable quotes

Consultant/author Shel Israel: "Social media is coming of age in the corporate world. The stuff that was cool with geeks two years ago is now being brought into the enterprise. Consultants are being asked about blogs and wikis more than ever before. Within the next two years, the use of video as a primary way of conversing with employees, prospects and branches worldwide will expand exponentially."

Anil Dash, vice president of SixApart: The openness and transparency of social software is not something companies are clamoring for. At too many gatherings like this, thre's little discussion of real world constraints. ... Email is failing us. We're not holding people accountable. These things are broken. Email, IM, they're interruptive. ... Employees under age 24 are using social tools in the workplace already. "They're using it at work, but they're not using it for work." Smart companies will find ways to change that and take advantage of these new social capabilities.

John McCrea, vice president of marketing, Plaxo: "The social web is not just about fun and interesting things and about throwing sheep and 'super-pokes,' but it's something fundamental and important that needs to be as open as the Web. By open we don't mean your privacy should be violated. By the open social web, we think all applications get better when they're socially enabled. The social graph is extremely important, and when you put it together with an application, it turbo-charges it. I disagree with the idea that there is a single social graph."

Anil: "My Facebook network couldn't be more different than my LinkedIn network."

Anil polled the mostly 20- to 50something audience of 200: about 80 people had Facebook accounts and only a half dozen had MySpace accounts.

Buzz Bruggeman (who's speaking tomorrow) pointed out that after he received 116 happy birthday wishes by friends on Facebook, he tried to reply to them en masse, but Facebook wouldn't allow it -- anything above 100 recipients is considered spam.

Panelist: "The strike rate [success rate] for new ideas is 1 in 200."

Audience member: "Dont forget that the average IQ is 100."

Panelist: "You can't outsource creativity"

Panelist: "25% of all education-related research on the web goes to Wikipedia; the next highest site is 4% for Encarta."

Audience member: "ISPs don't let you send more than 300 emails at a time."

September 6, 2007 at 11:44 PM in Business use, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

3 marketing strategies for thriving on the decentralized Web

Steve Rubel at Advertising Age (obnoxious registration required): Three strategies for thriving on the decentralized Web. Excerpt:

Long-form online content has been usurped by all things bite-size, whether it be widgets, YouTube clips, or micro blogs powered by services such as Tumblr, Jaiku and Twittergram. This column offers three simple steps marketers should consider to thrive in a web that is increasingly becoming decentralized.

Think web services, not websites. Most innovation online today is created by an army of talented, independent web developers. Sites such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook are turning themselves into platforms that can run these applications, almost like Windows did on the desktop. This has spawned hundreds of miniature online applications.

To thrive, marketers need to think about how to create similar mini experiences via web services that plug into these sites yet are consistent with the brand.

Connect people. The web is transforming into a medium where the greatest value is created when people connect via platforms of participation around a common goal -- to make money, be entertained or informed, to create, etc.

To thrive, brands need to identify these motivations and participate in these new microcontent platforms in a way that helps consumers meet their goals. For example, the Los Angeles Fire Department recognized that consumers actively use Twitter when disaster strikes. It has opened a channel on the site to provide updates at twitter.com/LAFD.

Make everything portable. The next version of the Macintosh operating system, due out in October, has a small feature called Web Clip that turns any part of a site into a widget that lives on the consumer's desktop. This is a big sign of things to come.

In the very near future portals including iGoogle, My Yahoo and Netvibes as well as social networks will be able to easily inhale the smallest pieces of content from across the web. Don't wait. Start now to make everything on your website embeddable. Traffic is becoming something that happens elsewhere, not just on your site.

September 2, 2007 at 12:26 PM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (1)

17-year-old girl who built a million-dollar website

Via Doshdosh: Case study of a teenage millionaire: Ashley Qualls and WhateverLife.com.

A 17-year-old high school dropout. Made more than $1 million. Earns as much as $70K a month. Owns a website that attracts more than 7 million monthly visitors and 60 million page views.

Her first Adsense paycheck was $2,790 and she has already rejected a $1.5 million buyout offer. I’m referring to Ashley Qualls, the founder of Whateverlife.com, a free MySpace layouts website.

Fastcompany recently published a fascinating feature article on Ashley, a teenage entrepreneur from Detroit who has made a substantial amount of money online by targeting a niche market (girls on Myspace/social networks) and fulfilling their needs.

Ashley is evidence of the meritocracy on the Internet that allows even companies run by neophyte entrepreneurs to compete, regardless of funding, location, size, or experience–and she’s a reminder that ingenuity is ageless.

She has taken in more than $1 million, thanks to a now-familiar Web-friendly business model. Her MySpace page layouts are available for the bargain price of…nothing. They’re free for the taking. Her only significant source of revenue so far is advertising.

Like other high traffic websites, Whateverlife.com runs CPM ads by Casale Media and Value Click, alongside Google Adsense and Nabbr, a revenue sharing video widget. The integration for each ad type is relatively well done and not too intrusive. The main problem is that Ashley doesn’t seem to be selling ads directly, which is a huge loss considering the amount of traffic she gets.

Currently, a site like Techcrunch makes $10K per 125 x 125 ad block and that’s with 4.0 million page views per month. Whateverlife gets 15 times more page views ...

According to the article, Whateverlife.com has a larger audience than the combined circulation of magazines like Seventeen, Teen Vogue, and CosmoGirl!. This is something remarkable.

Doshdosh has a few suggestions for Ashley to monetize her amazing traffic numbers.

Here's FastCompany's multimedia slide show on Ashley. And here's Ashley's response.

September 2, 2007 at 01:02 AM in Business use, Web/Tech, Weblogs, Youth culture | Permalink | Comments (4)

How to make money off of Facebook

Business 2.0: The Facebook economy. How third parties are making money off of Facebook. (Above, the partners of SocialMedia.com, no relation to SocialMedia.biz.) Excerpt:

Zuckerberg has turned the MySpace business model upside down: Not only is he giving developers their own real estate within Facebook - both inside users' profile pages and on piggybacked application pages - but he's allowing them to make money from their apps any way they can, from ad sales to direct purchases of services and merchandise. For example, download iLike, an app that lets you sample and purchase music, and the developer gets a 5 percent kickback if you end up buying songs from iTunes or Amazon.

To incentivize developers, Facebook is also breaking ranks with rivals by sharing crucial data - such as a user's age, interests, and friends - that enables more sophisticated applications. ...

Josh Kopelman, a Philadelphia-based venture capitalist and investor in such startups as LinkedIn and Yapta, sees more users coming Facebook's way (ComScore reports Facebook grew 270 percent last year, while MySpace grew 72 percent) - and even more developers. "If you were a venture-backed Web startup," Kopelman says, "and had to decide whether to focus on a site that welcomed you in and let you keep 100 percent of the revenue you generate, vs. a site with a vague policy that doesn't let you generate any revenue, it's not even a decision. It's an IQ test." ...

What apps work on Facebook?

There's a science to achieving perfect viral alchemy, and it's getting more sophisticated by the day. One place every Facebook developer frequents is Appaholic.com. Created by San Francisco-based programmer Jesse Farmer, Appaholic breaks down Facebook applications by popularity, growth rate, and even "virality," as measured by growth in a single day. On a recent day, Farmer ticked off the leading app in each category: Top Friends, a Slide application that lets you rank your friends; Griddle, a word game; and What's My Chinese Name? ...

Farmer has already spotted a few telltale patterns. One attribute that's death to an app, he says, is complexity. Facebook and all its homegrown applications are relatively simple; those who create something that requires too much thought or explanation quickly run into trouble. ...

Four ways to make money

1: Sell ads

The play

Just about any Facebook app can get into the ad game, but only those with the biggest audiences will earn serious money. Several easy-to-use ad networks are already delivering the ads for a cut of overall sales.

The front-runners

Graffiti (5.9 million users). This highly viral drawing tool spread quickly because of its simplicity and originality.

iLike (5.4 million users). Users can set up their music and video libraries in mere minutes.

2: Attract sponsors

The play

Advertisers are already sponsoring apps. Besides being widely used, your application needs to offer companies a natural way to interact with their customers.

The front-runners

Likeness (2.9 million users). Offers quizzes that generate top-10 lists - an ideal branding vehicle - and matches them with those of friends with similar preferences.

FoodFight (2 million users). Virtual lunch money buys you food to throw at friends. Next up on its menu: chicken wings from a major food chain.

3: Sell services

The play

As apps become more about utility and less about fun, opportunities will arise to sell digital services of lasting value to users. Eventually, they'll make purchases without leaving their profiles.

The front-runners

Files (43,000 users). Offered by Box.net, this online file-storage service turns a Facebook profile into a repository for members' digital media.

Picnik (206,000 users). A Facebook version of Photoshop.(Hello, Adobe?) Basic tools are free; advanced features are offered for an additional fee.

4: Sell products

The play

As Facebook increasingly becomes the center of people's digital lives, it's also becoming a venue for selling things - digital and otherwise - to its fast-growing audience.

The front-runners

Amazing Giftbox (127,000 users). Sends virtual Amazon merchandise.

Band Tracker (29,000 users). Searches upcoming concerts and links to ticket vendors.

Visual CD Rack (20,000 users). Lets users browse and buy music from a virtual CD rack.

The payoff

Most developers are going the affiliate route, offering product wish lists and then sending users to sites like Amazon.com or iTunes. Others, however, are directly selling such items as ringtones and T-shirts.

Tricks of the trade

1. Be a middleman. iLike makes its music-sampling apps simple and hands off sales to iTunes or Amazon via affiliate partnerships. Those directly selling hard goods need to prepare for the complexity of payment and delivery.

2. Keep it simple. Facebook has not yet become a place where people are likely to buy, say, a digital camera. But users are starting to purchase items that don't break the bank and extend Facebook's utility. XLR8 Mobile, for instance, is looking to sell ringtones and wallpaper on Facebook via custom storefront widgets. "We don't want to bring people to the store," says XLR8 Mobile CEO Perry Tell. "We prefer to bring the store to the people."

3. Give it away. Going viral is always the goal. One great way to get there is by offering free samples. Whether it's a digital download of a song or the image of an item, give your customers a taste of what they'll get before asking them to commit.

4. Don't rule out the odd. "Sometimes wacky, unusual, off-the-beaten-path stuff sells huge," Tell says. "Everyone is looking for the next Crazy Frog, so you must be willing to try lots of things."

Go read the article (or better yet, subscribe, like I do) for the complete rundown. Facebook is emerging as the new digital marketplace.

August 31, 2007 at 12:33 AM in Business use, Social networks | Permalink | Comments (1)

How to run a corporate blog

Steve Rubel (who's moving his blog from TypePad to WordPress because of spam -- yikes!) has a short piece at the Wired wiki: How to run a corporate blog. Top bullet points:

* Be passionate and add value
* Know where your bread is buttered
* Color in the lines
* Think before you post
* Have a thick skin and a sense of humor

August 23, 2007 at 11:09 PM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Company bloggers can help put out fires

Business Edge: Company bloggers can help put out fires. Dell manager's quick reaction won industry accolades.

August 10, 2007 at 10:06 AM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Social media and business

Cartoonist-thinker Hugh MacLeod on businesses' use of social media. (A few weeks ago I added Hugh's syndicated cartoon, fed by an RSS feed, to the right nav of this blog.)

July 22, 2007 at 10:19 PM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

How social media works for business

Mark Sigal at Social Computing Magazine: Social media explained.

July 14, 2007 at 10:57 PM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

TechDirt's bid for corporate blog analysis

Mark Glaser at PBS's MediaShift: TechDirt Builds Community of Bloggers to Offer Corporate Analysis.

There's plenty of consulting work to go around (Social Media Group does consulting in this space).

Later: Mike at TechDirt ampllies:

We don't offer consulting services.  We simplyoffer access to a group of experts covering a variety of topics -- and the Social Media Group is more than encouraged to join as well. We're offering an inquiry and analysis business that helps drive *more* business to consultants.  The consultants who do well on inquiries can get more business.  We don't do any of the things you list on the page about the Social Media Group.  We just connect companies who need insight with people who have insight (in many areas, well beyond social media).

June 20, 2007 at 10:04 PM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

The new world of radical transparency

The current (April) issue of Wired magazine has several articles on transparency. Here's Clive Thompson's article, with input from the former audience: The See-Through CEO. Great stuff. Excerpt:

Radical forms of transparency are now the norm at startups - and even some Fortune 500 companies. It is a strange and abrupt reversal of corporate values. Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right - and wrong. Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, dishes company dirt and apologizes to startups he's accidentally screwed. Venture capitalists now demand that CEOs be fluent in blogspeak. In February, after JetBlue trapped passengers for hours in its storm-grounded planes and canceled 1,100 flights, CEO David Neeleman tried to deflect the blast of bad publicity by using YouTube to air his own blunt mea culpa. Microsoft, once a paragon of buttoned-down control, now posts uncensored internal videos - and encourages its engineers to blog freely about their projects (see page 140). The very process of developing ideas, products, and messages is changing - from musing about it in a room with your top people to throwing it out on the Web and asking the global smartmob for a little help. That's how this article was written: I've been blogging about it since I started, and some of the reader input I received is reproduced on these pages. ...

Secrecy is dying. It's probably already dead. In a world where Eli Lilly's internal drug-development memos, Paris Hilton's phonecam images, Enron's emails, and even the governor of California's private conversations can be instantly forwarded across the planet, trying to hide something illicit - trying to hide anything, really - is an unwise gamble. So many blogs rely on scoops to drive their traffic that muckraking has become a sort of mass global hobby. Radical transparency has even reached the ultrasecretive world of Washington politics: The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation has begun putting zillions of public documents in elegantly searchable online databases, leaving it to interested citizens to connect the dots. One adroit digger recently discovered that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert had earmarked $200 million for a highway to be built near a property he had a stake in. When the property was sold, Hastert made a 500 percent profit on his original investment, provoking a wave of negative coverage.

All of which explains why the cult of transparency has so many high tech converts these days. Transparency is a judo move. Your customers are going to poke around in your business anyway, and your workers are going to blab about internal info - so why not make it work for you by turning everyone into a  partner in the process and inviting them to do so? ...

"I think that most of the rage people feel toward these big institutions, like government or corporations or media, is that they feel they're not listened to, that no one's there," says Shel Israel, coauthor of Naked Conversations. By seeming "basically like a normal human," a company can quickly generate a surge of goodwill.

April 19, 2007 at 12:21 AM in Business use, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (0)

How Microsoft got radically innovative with Channel 9

From the April issue of Wired magazine: Operation Channel 9. When five Microsoft guys started posting internal videos for the world to see, many at the famously secretive company freaked. And that was before thousands of in-house bloggers took to their keyboards. A dispatch from the front lines of transparency. 

Robert Scoble has told me more than a few stories about working on Channel 9, but this is the first thorough public telling I've come across:

Lenn Pryor knew his little project was going to upset some of his colleagues at Microsoft. And sure enough, when the junior exec unveiled a Web site called Channel 9 in April 2004, the organization reacted like a dog whose tail had been stepped on. You could hear the yelps and howls all over Redmond. Pryor started to sweat.

"Who told you you could do this? I want a meeting with your VP," read an email from a marketing executive in the Windows division. "Some of the information in the last video was false. Do you realize shareholders could sue us over this?" an attorney pinged. And then there were the dozens of awkward hallway run-ins: Someone in public relations or marketing would stop Pryor and ask, in effect, "Who do you think you are?"

By then, Pryor had been at Microsoft seven years. He spent the last two as director of platform evangelism - building good relations with outside code writers. For Channel 9, he had a powerful line of executive support running all the way up to Jim Allchin, then head of the company's giant Windows division. But in the face of some of the "nastygrams," as he calls them, Pryor wondered how long that support would last. "That first month I probably had 10 to 15 near-death experiences where I thought I was going to be fired," he says.

What Pryor had done to set off this uproar was outfit a team of five people, himself included, with camcorders and turn them loose on the company to interview engineers about their jobs and their products. Then he posted the clips - unvetted and largely unedited - to a Web site that anyone, inside or outside the company, could see and comment on. He and his team expected the initiative to be controversial, so, except for the executives backing it, they told almost no one in the company. "The key," Pryor says, "was to not draw too much attention to ourselves." By lying low, Pryor headed off preemptive opposition. But when Channel 9 launched, executives in PR, marketing, and legal reacted with alarm. "They didn't take it well at first," Pryor tells me.

Today, Channel 9 is one of the few things at Microsoft that company image mavens love to talk about. Google is kicking Microsoft's butt in search; Vista, its new operating system, is getting tepid reviews. Zune, its iPod killer, can't kill a flea. And Nintendo's Wii, not the Xbox 360, is the hottest game console in town. Channel 9, on the other hand, makes Microsoft look downright visionary. No large company - with the possible exception of Sun Microsystems - is as far along in understanding how the Internet changes the way employees connect with suppliers, customers, shareholders, and peers. The goal is clear: Reestablish Microsoft as a cool, progressive enterprise that appeals to customers, investors, and top job prospects. While the rest of corporate America is scrambling to figure out whether it wants to allow blogging at all, famously guarded, control-freak Microsoft has embraced the idea of transparency with messianic fervor.

You may have heard of Robert Scoble, the Microsoft blogger who became a Web celebrity, winning over software developers with bracingly candid posts about his employer. (He left for a podcasting startup 10 months ago.) But Scoble was just the most visible face of the transparency revolution Channel 9 ignited inside Microsoft. In fact, the 71,000-employee company now has more than 4,500 bloggers posting on every imaginable tech topic, from startups to SQL. ...

April 18, 2007 at 11:48 PM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Becoming more social

Entrepreneur.com article at MSNBC.com: Becoming More Social. We demystify what social networking entails and how you can use it to your business's advantage.

April 11, 2007 at 11:47 PM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Big business ‘gets’ social media

BizCommunity.com: Big business ‘gets’ social media

Social media is proving a big hit for global corporations inside and out, but risks remain. Research organisation, Melcrum, has announced the preliminary findings of the first ever survey into social media adoption by large corporations worldwide. More than 2100 executives responded about how blogs, podcasts, wikis and other collaborative technologies are being used to communicate with employees and customers.

Blogs are widespread but online video is the number one application.

Much of the hype around social media so far has centered around the adoption of blogging as a business tool for communicating with customers and staff. The majority of respondents (55%) were already using blogs or planning to start in the next 12 months, but even more popular was online video (63%) through video sharing services like You Tube.

Also increasingly popular were podcasts (43%), RSS/webfeeds (51%) and social networks like LinkedIn (41%). ...

When internal communicators were asked about the top two perceived benefits of social media for their organizations, 71% selected "improved employee engagement", 59% said "improved internal collaboration" and 47% chose "creating a two-way dialogue with senior executives".

Robin Crumby adds that: "The next generation of employees entering the workforce will expect to be able to have their say and network with their peers online. Corporations are preparing for this now. By encouraging staff and customers to get involved and build communities around their brands, companies know that they can get better results in terms of staff productivity and engagement, but also customer retention and acquisition."

Risk to reputation needs to be properly managed though.

While there is widespread enthusiasm for social media in the corporate world, 45% of respondents agreed that employees discussing their organisation online posed a significant risk to its reputation. And yet, 70% admitted that they had no guidelines or policies relating to blogging or other social-media tools.

Even more worrying, was that only 26% were sure how to monitor what was being said about their organisations, industry or products online.

Robin Crumby commented that "Smart organisations like the BBC, Sun Microsystems and IBM are encouraging their staff to blog and participate in online forums whilst educating them about the dos and don'ts, thereby minimising the risk of libel suits." ...

For the purpose of this survey, SOCIAL MEDIA was defined as: the online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences and perspectives with each other. A few prominent examples of social-media applications are Wikipedia (reference), MySpace (social networking), YouTube (video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), Digg (news sharing), Flickr (photo sharing), Miniclip (game sharing). These sites typically use technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis and vlogs to allow users to interact. Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media.

April 5, 2007 at 12:38 AM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Social media adopted by big business

Digital Media News: Social Media Adopted by Big Business.

A University of Massachusetts Dartmouth survey found that the fastest growing Inc. 500 companies adopt blogging, podcasting and other social media as business tools and a majority of companies consider social media to play significant strategic role.

January 25, 2007 at 11:51 PM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (1)

Where to sell your digital photos online

The Personal Bee has a roundup of sites where you can sell your digital photographs: How To Sell Your Photographs Online: A Citizen Journalist's Mini-Guide To Monetizing Your Camera-Phone Content. Sites covered include Scoopt, Cell Journalist, Scooplive, SpyMedia, Citizen Image, and others.

January 24, 2007 at 11:55 PM in Business use, Photography | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (0)

Why blogging matters for retailers

Dave Olson's Elastic Path just issued a whitepaper on Blogging for Retailers -- why it matters.

January 23, 2007 at 09:22 PM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Signs of the times

Cool signs for your workplace. See them on Flickr.

November 11, 2006 at 06:58 PM in Business use | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)