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Back in December we posed the question: How will social media change the way we do business in 2008? We also went on to discuss 10 major social media trends that were going mainstream. Well, we’re in June now and it is time for a mid-year review of those trends. We discuss the trends and pass verdict on their progress.

 

1.      Social Influence Marketing becomes the third dimension of marketing  There’s no doubt that social media has given rise to a totally new form of marketing called Social Influence Marketing. Those brands that simply treat social media as another channel through which to push advertising are missing the point. Social Influence Marketing is about harnessing the peer and anonymous influencers and strategically leveraging social media to meet marketing and business objectives.

 

It’s not a channel but a new way of thinking recognizing how the web has gone completely social. And in fact contrary to what we earlier thought, social influence marketing is not just about extending conversations beyond campaigns, it is about leveraging social influencers to achieve broader marketing and business objectives.

 

Verdict: Trend is even larger than we thought.

Earlier this week I was on a panel at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley. Hosted by Charlene Li of Forrester, the panel discussed web 2.0 in the enterprise and how social media is changing collaboration behind the firewall. 

I'm going to take a chance and talk about a web service that I've just started playing with. Only because I think it has phenomenal potential. It is one of those web services that I've been waiting to use for a few years. Its called Blippr and its in private beta at the moment.

A few years back I was the lone Avenue A | Razorfish blogger with the Workplace blog. A lot has changed in a short while. Every second day we now have a new blogger in our midst. It is exciting to see so many more employees take to blogging and experiment with styles and formats. The latest entrants are Grant and Mary with the Headlight blog covering the auto industry on a monthly basis. It covers digital automative trends and insights and the first few posts focus on going green. Don't miss the article on Green Social Networking tools and topics which discusses Goloco.

There hasn't been too much social innovation in the financial services sector. Most large banks have taken hesitant steps into the social web. Their reluctance to do so is understandable. As a sector, they have a lot to worry about and the last thing that they'd want to do is take on more risk - especially when their brands are taking such a beating. As a result, the most innovation is happening among the startups. Two in particular really impress me and an internal email chain about social media and financial services got me thinking about them again.

There's one obvious area where Office Depot is definitely ahead of Staples and that's in recognizing the power of social influence. Take a look at the Office Depot Planner product page above. Notice the little Facebook, Digg and del.icio.us icons? Yes, I can easily share an image of the product I'm thinking of buying on my social network or add it to my bookmark list. On clicking on the Facebook icon, a window opens asking me whether I want to post the image of the Planner to my profile or send it to a friend. See below for how this looks.

Few e-retailers understand the power of social influence the way Amazon does. From its wildly successful customer reviews to the more recent customer images, Amazon tries hard to take advantage of the notion that when it comes to purchasing books we are heavily influenced by one another. Probably my favorite feature on Amazon has been the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" one. It tells me what other books I'd be interested in based on my interest in a specific book and what other customers bought. Those recommended books can be filtered by category and scroll horizontally like the Apple Album Cover Flow interface.

They're so close and yet so far. I watched with increasing interest the launch, promotion and growth of My Starbucks Idea. On the surface, I really like it. It is an enthusiastic effort by a social brand to be more social. If there's anyone who should be really embracing social media, its Starbucks because the brand is about community and people.

It's a simple concept - users are invited to tell Starbucks what they should be doing. Users publish their ideas and others comment and vote on them. Every now and then Starbucks takes an idea and moves it to the "See" section. Acknowledgment that the idea has legs and is being turned in to reality. I like it.

But its missing a few things. The first is best represented by this user comment in the Idea section.

I don't know how long this ideas website will be up for, but I hope this idea is reviewed soon by the ideas people in the company.

Starbucks doesn't participate in the conversation. It doesn't respond to comments directly rather it responds more broadly in the "See" section when they're making reality out of an idea. That's disappointing. If you expect your customers to help you, you should be willing to participate in their conversation. Not stand by silently or only speak from a pulpit.

What's also missing is there's no form of reward for ideas turned into reality. Imagine if every person who participated in the discussion around a frequency card, were added to a beta list for that card? That would be a great way to thank those customers for their thoughts. It would seed the concept with passionate consumers too. Opportunity missed.

On the whole though, I'm impressed. It borrows from the Dell Ideastorm concept and applies it to the Starbucks world. I believe that concepts like these are the future of the contact us page. Every site will need to have an area like this - a place where the brand solicits feedback from its customers and responds to their comments. If a brand doesn't want to be social in this manner, it shouldn't really be on the web at all.

Brian Morrissey discusses how social media is extending the life of ad campaigns in an Adweek article published today. As usual he's spot on and quotes me discussing what it means.

"The traditional campaign model doesn't work anymore," said Shiv Singh, director of strategic initiatives at Avenue A/Razorfish, owned by Microsoft. "If you have a social-media driven campaign, you can't stop it necessarily when you want to stop it. It's akin to having a dinner party and suddenly turning the lights off."

What are the implications of this? Its harder to budget for a social media driven ad campaign. While you can always turn the media spend off when you want to, you can't necessarily turn off the campaign. If a conversation has started and people are participating, linking and talking about your campaign you have to let that carry on. Problems may arise when the message gets tired or when the conversation degenerates into something you don't want but that can't be helped too.

That's why when you think about the social media in the context of a campaign, think carefully. The returns maybe awesome but the risks can be huge too.

The web of the future will allow any person, object, or piece of information to be intelligently linked to one another says Tim Berners Lee in the Times of London where he talks up the semantic web. For those of who aren't familiar with the semantic web, its the term used to describe how any piece of data and not just a web page will be structured so that it can communicate with other information by built in semantic relationships in the information itself.

Now we've all know about the semantic web for a while. And before web 2.0 we thought the semantic web would be the next big thing. Now we believe it will be the next thing after web 2.0. Is it really just round the corner? The problem with the whole semantic web story is easy to understand - somebody or something needs to create all those relationships between the various data elements that we interact with everyday through the Internet. To date, there hasn't been the right tools around to create those relationships.

Well now with the whole social networking phenomena we're connecting to data elements ourselves using the social networks and each other as starting points. Sure, the semantic web and applications like Twine will take this a lot further but I have to wonder how much they will be adopted. Do we need those relationships created automatically for us? Will we use them? We're depending upon each other to create those relationships and so far that's worked fine. I suppose only time will tell but in the meantime, the search engines are preparing for the future.

Here's a link to the Scientific American article where the Semantic Web was first discussed.

Sometimes I prefer to wait before blogging about a news item. I learn by reading everyone else's comments and I get to observe how the the news maker responds to the initial wave of feedback from the blogosphere. That's what I'm doing with Guy Kawasaki's Alltop. It launched early in February and is evolving based on initial feedback. I sent Guy my thoughts too and he responded via email. Guy's responses are in italics.

What is Alltop?
Alltop aggregates RSS feeds from key blogs around the web. It categorizes them by topic and each topic gets its own page. There are around 30 topics varying from Design to Celebrities and Gaming to Mac. The most controversial topic is Egos which includes blogs from those that Guy considers to be the egos of the web. Guy Kawasaki chooses which blogs to publish as well as the ordering of the blogs. There's basically no user input involved in the hierarchy and choices of the blogs. No personalization at all.


What do I like about it?

1. It points me to some useful blogs.  While I know which are the important blogs in my primary areas of interest like Social Media, Design, Mac, Politics and Food, I don't know which blogs to scan in other areas. In that sense, Alltop serves as a starting point especially if I am doing some research.

2. It's clean, uncluttered and kind on the eyes. Each topic has 50-100 RSS feeds. They have a lot of information. But somehow the pages don't seem cluttered and dense. In fact, Alltop seems lighter than my iGoogle pages which have roughly the same number of RSS feeds.

3. Less is more for Alltop. I know exactly what to expect from Alltop and every page meets those expectations. There aren't any surprises and nor do I need to watch a flash tutorial to understand what's going on. There isn't anything complex about this.

4. Applying progressive disclosure. I really like how mousing over a headline gives me more information. We've all seen this elsewhere on the web, it is a useful, time saving feature. I don't like how Google forces me to click a plus sign to get that information.

What's not working?

1. No conversation opportunities. I'm surprised few other bloggers picked up on this. I find it really disappointing that there's no way for me to comment on Alltop itself. Or to see the number of comments associated with an RSS feed. Now I know this would be harder to do technologically but its worth putting effort into this. Maybe for Version 2.0? What about a way to rate the blogs themselves or to suggest new blogs. Don't miss the conversation opportunities. Please don't miss the conversation opportunities.

Guy's feedback - This is sort of off-vision for us. Not everything has to be a social networking/conversation site. We want to be “digital magazine rack” not a pickup bar.

So we don’t want the site cluttered by comments, lame or smart. We want people to come to their topics, scan, read some stories in depth, and be done with it. If they want friends, they can go to Facebook.

2. Blog hierarchy doesn't make sense on topic pages. I don't understand Guy's ordering of the blogs in each topic. Is it by his preference, technorati rankings, when they were added, evolving popularity.... I have no idea. If you're not letting me set my own order at least tell me how you've set it yourself.

 The rationale is very complex, actually. And it’s mostly in my brain. :-) The first 15 feeds or so are either very popular ones to give people a comfortable feeling, very good (good does not always equal popular), strategic (ie, good for positioning Alltop as useful), or my buddies/people who have helped me or the site. How do I explain this? We’re not some division of CNN or Yahoo!. We are quirky, opinionated, etc. little startup than can do whatever it wants without a consulting study from Forrester or McKknsey.

One exception is Religion.alltop.com which is purely alphabetical since it’s too hard to judge “quality” for this topic.

I also am not a big believer in the wisdom of the crowds, so it’s not going to be just some gameable system of ranking. Plus, the ranking and positions cannot be dynamic. People want to know, more or less, when they come back that the feeds are roughly in the same place all the time.

We may open up for a poll to solicit feedback, but that’s just do discover gems that we don’t know about, not to make it a user-generated order. At the most, we’re considering drag and drop reordering of feeds.

3. You need to scroll to find topics on the front page. Descriptions certainly help readers understand a topic but if that forces topics below the fold, you've got a problem. I would remove the descriptions (or maybe have them appear on mouse over) so that all the topics fit above the fold on a 1024*768 screen.

At some point soon, we’re going to have to redesign our home page. We were only going to to celebrity gossip and just kept on going. I doubt we can get away with no description. Also, I believe is something is compelling enough, having a few folds won’t kill you:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/02/demystifying-ab.html

4. Can't browse and switch between topics. It appears that Alltop is designed for the surgical user in mind. The person who knows his favorite topics and likes to only visit them everyday. The person who probably bookmarks the topic page directly. But what about the user who likes to browse between topics? Once I'm on a topic page I have to click the annoying Alltop band to go back to the home page to choose another topic. Let me jump across topics directly.

I don’t know about surgical, but but we don’t think people will linger at the home page. How do you jump across topics in Google Reader? If you don’t have folders, your feeds are all intermingled. If you have folders, you have to navigate through folders. How do you browse in Google Reader or any other customized reader?

We think people will bookmark their favorite topics. They might come to the home page once and never again.

Here’s the $64,000 question. Not knowing your family at all, suppose your mother, father, spouse, or kid one day asked, “I love XX, can you show me where I can get the best news about it?” Where XX = fashion, gadgets, sports, religion, green, humor, cute, design, celerities, etc.

What are you going to say? Get Google reader/NetNewsWire/Pageflakes/Netvibes/iGoogle/MyYahoo, then find some good sites, then import their feeds, then organize your reader, then check updates? Wow, you must love your relatives more than I do. :-) And most likely they will say, “Huh? Where do I get that?” After they get it, “Where do I find the feed?” After that “How I do Import? What’s XML? What’s RSS 2.0?” 

How long did it take you go get Google Reader to the state you  have it in today? Our page for any topic renders in 5 seconds. :-) Assuming we have topic you want. For you, the marginal value of spending hours over the course of time to customize Google Reader is worth it.  We’re looking to serve the 99.9% of the world who will not use RSS feeds the way you, I, and Dave Winer do. If it means that the .1% won’t use Alltop, that’s the risk we have to take.

Alltop in of itself isn't something revolutionary. Some would argue that it isn't even a digital product in its own right (aggregating blogs is not revolutionary). But it does serve a basic need - helping us figure out what to read. But in this day and age that may not be enough. I wonder what the final version will be like.

Social Networks and free don't necessarily go together always. The Financial Times is planning to launch a premium social network for executives according to PaidContent.org. Annual membership will be $3,350 and it will allow  members to “maintain contact with peers and luminaries ...  and to stay in touch with the key issues facing fellow members.” For $3,350 members get free subscriptions to FT.com, admission to any of the FT conferences, 20 percent of further tickets, face-to-face members' events and a 12 month FT.com subscription. The forums will also take advertising.

While this may seem astronomically expensive on the surface, it may not be. Conferences alone can cost the same amount and readers will probably be excited about the exclusivity. I believe social networks that cater to niche audiences and have points of passage (meaning not anyone can simply join them) will get stronger in 2008. We're not interested in joining more and more networks anymore. Quality matters more than quantity. It seems like the Financial Times may understand this. Lets see how successful it really is though.

Our Chicago office designed and built the recently launched uPumpItUp Community for the Crystal Light brand of Kraft foods. The site which is hosted by Mandy Moore encourages women to have conversations with like minded individuals in more personal, human and engaging ways. Women can meet up with friends, inspire each other and share good feelings by participating in positive challenges.