STEP TEN
Keep Up with New Technologies and Thrive
The final step of this book may, in some ways, be the most important. After all, in the time that it took you to even skim through this book, perhaps a key piece of data was updated online, or a new social networking software or service was launched that (once you discover it) will help your business grow or perhaps threaten its survival. If you feel overwhelmed, you are not alone. If you feel unprepared for the task, remember that no one (not even the most technology savvy 20-something) knows everything. You have to start somewhere, and this book is as good a place to start as any.
Constant Change
First, you must remember that social networking systems are inherently organic and dynamic. New members join and participate vigorously, existing members stop logging on or do so infrequently, some members quit and join other social networking systems, and some members just decide that they “don't get it” and leave the whole social networking landscape behind. For the members who remain engaged, the creators and administrators of the social networking systems make nearly continuous changes based on their feedback.
Continuous change and opportunity also drive software programmers to design new applications that interface with popular social networking systems discussed in this book, such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and others. These “bolt-on” applications enhance the user experience and may be opportunities to connect with your customers or client base. Facebook alone has more than 350,000 applications created by third-party developers. Following are some examples of these applications and how you might use them in your business.
Promotions is a Facebook-verified application for companies and agencies to run branded interactive promotions on Facebook fan pages (see http://apps.facebook.com/promotionshq). Promotion categories include sweepstakes, contests, coupons, giveaways, and so on. The application enables small and large businesses to establish campaigns that can be targeted and managed through a centralized management tool to multiple social networking channels reasonably. Add targeted advertising to attract even more people to your campaign offering.
SlideShare is a Facebook-verified application that enables users to upload and share presentations and documents with your Facebook network via multiple file types (ppt, pps, pptx, odp, pdf, doc, docx, odt, keynote, pages). You can share presentations and documents with your fans and other people. Have a new marketing presentation for a new product? Upload it to your Facebook fan page. Want to share a podcast or other presentation? Post it on SlideShare. If you have a SlideShare account, you get the added benefit of automatic uploads to your LinkedIn account if it is linked to SlideShare. You can also go directly to www.slideshare.net and use the application.
Want to establish a storefront for free? Facebook offers an application that enables businesses to establish a storefront on Facebook and manage your products.
TwitterCounter (www.twittercounter.com) is a site that enables businesses to register their Twitter account and run statistical analysis on followers, friends, and updates. It also provides predictive analytics to estimate the total number of followers, friends, and updates you will see the next day and 30 days out. This is helpful if you are trying to determine how effective your Twitter campaign is and its potential reach.
Thousands of other social networking applications, from photo sharing and blogging applications to the many internal and external social networking systems noted in this book, have an equally busy cadre of software engineers figuring out ways to leverage the power of social networks. Following are some examples of these social networking applications.
Flickr (www.flickr.com)—This social networking application allows you to upload, manage, tag, and share your photos and videos easily. There is even a way to associate the photos and videos with maps, so people can see exactly where the photos were taken. Like many other applications discussed in this book, Flickr also has some add-ons to enhance the experience, such as Flickriver (www.flickriver.com), which provides a seamless way to search and view many pictures.
Meetup (www.meetup.com)—This site enables people to create meetup groups for community, business, hobbies, and social connections (see Figure 10.1). Want to find a group of small businesses that want to meetup for a discussion near you? Create the meetup group, write the description, and post. People seeking similar connections can find out about your meeting and see you there. They can share the invites virally via email or word of mouth to further advertise the meeting.
FIGURE 10.1
Meetup Group Set-up Page
Instant messaging (IM)—One of the core premises of instant messaging, which is often taken for granted, is that it only works when people are connected to other people. By default, they are powerful networking tools, which can be used to drive productivity in the workplace, disseminate information, and get just-in-time answers to questions throughout the day. Some IM tools now act like social network aggregators. Microsoft's Messenger runs continuous feeds of your Messenger network happenings. When a buddy updates a picture on his or her profile, adds content to Windows Live, or changes his or her status, you can see it in a real-time feed, much like the social aggregators that were discussed previously (on a smaller scale).
Filtering Out the Noise
Clearly, keeping up with technology could be a full-time job and if you are reading this book, you are not charged with that task. More likely you are a solo consultant, a small business owner, or a medium or large business project manager charged with making baseline decisions about how social networking systems and applications can help your business compete and stay relevant. If that's the case, then the following recommendations should be a good starting point toward developing a sufficient technology savvy system to remain relevant. Some are obvious but need highlighting anyway, while other suggestions may provide new insight and options for you.
POINTER
Actively Use and Participate in Your Network
An obvious but often ignored principle for using social networking systems for business is the importance of actually paying full attention to the interactions of your customer or client members with your business. Smaller enterprises without the luxury of a dedicated social networking staff may not be able to monitor the interactions or be up to date on the incremental changes made to even popular software such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. For example, monitoring your company's Facebook account may reveal a service or offering specifically targeted for a segment of your membership and thus valuable customer intelligence for your own marketing efforts. Other ways to actively participate in your network include
Listen for complaints. If you see them, route them to the right team or person in the organization to address them. If you can make it right or even respond to the person(s) with the issue, it goes a long way toward repairing any damaged customer relationships.
Provide product or service updates. Even small companies can provide updates on key products or services (preferably in a conversational, non-sales tone) to keep its customers aware of new product developments and offerings.
Don't underestimate your connections. Remember that the people following your posts on social networking applications are more than just customers. They might be potential employees one day. They might be students in high school or college contemplating a career in your industry or actively seeking internships in your company. They might be innovators with great ideas that can move your company forward. If you don't actively participate in your social networks, you may miss great opportunities for making these types of tangential, yet powerful, connections.
Finally, join interesting or new social networking groups or services to fully understand emerging social networking systems. Perhaps you will even want to link your network or business to the site or include some of the features of your own system, especially if your company has opted to build its own social networking system. Following are some interesting social networking concepts to check out.
At Concept Feedback (www.conceptfeedback.com), you can submit marketing, graphic design, web design, videos, logos, and other digital marketing media to be reviewed by the community for enhancement recommendations. Reviewers are qualified community members who are ranked by the quality of their feedback (see Figure 10.2). The service is free and easy to use.
The notion of crowdsourcing has been discussed several times in this book. Get Satisfaction (www.getsatisfaction.com) takes this concept to a new level. The Get Satisfaction application enables customers to interact and
provide questions to companies through an easy-to-use web interface (or over mobile devices like the iPhone). Company customer care and other employees can respond to the questions, but the interesting part is that other customers who know the answers can respond as well. When a question is answered, everyone who posted the question gets the answer too. This minimizes customer care costs by leveraging answers already created. The service is reasonably priced and can be used by small, medium, or large businesses.
FIGURE 10.2
Concept Feedback Home Page
Follow Blogs Focused on Social Media and Networking
Follow the many groups, bloggers, and individuals who write about social networking technology. Even cursory research will uncover many blogs dedicated to social networking. Some provide current news and updates on various social networking platforms and the technological or business implications of new social networking developments. Others cover the topic from a sociological point of view and social networking's impact on culture and human communication. Following are a few examples to start with:
Mashable (The Social Media Guide)—http://mashable.com
Technorati blog—http://blog.technorati.com
Twittorati—http://twittorati.com
TechCrunch—www.techcrunch.com
Digital Trends—www.digitaltrends.com
Fresh News—www.freshnews.org
MIT's Technology Review—www.technologyreview.com
Gigaom—http://gigaom.com.
Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel, IBM, Dell, Verizon, and other large companies constantly compete to stay ahead of the technology curve. Follow the news from the most visible players in the industry by signing up for automatic news feeds about business activity and new developments. You can also scan select major magazines and newspapers online, such as Fast Company, Wired, Fortune, Time, Newsweek, or The New York Times, and trade and industry publications such as CNet for developments that might be useful for your business.
Search and Join
Even a search within Facebook for companies that invest, use, and develop social networking can be informative. Go to Internet social networking aggregation sites, such as Technorati.com, SocialMention.com, Delicious.com, and Socialnetworkingwatch.com, and search for “social networking.” For example, if your business goals include connecting with customers by social networking marketing, go to Delicious.com and enter the tag “social networking marketing” and you'll see the bookmarks associated with this tag (see Figure 10.3). You can dig down to specific people who have bookmarked these tags and see the sites and information they reference.
FIGURE 10.3
Tag Search on Delicious
POINTER
Take a Technology Expert to Lunch
Sometimes the best social networking is done face to face. Take a tech savvy friend or colleague to lunch and take notes or bring your laptop to a restaurant with wireless access. You can also make an appointment with one of your organization's IT gurus and ask him or her to show you what he or she thinks is the latest social networking application.
Attend Conferences and Online Webinars
Social media has spawned professional conferences on the topic, as well as online webinars. Leading-edge technology developments are often introduced at these events. There are also many vendors present who are eager to talk about their products. Online webinars about social networking are readily available through a standard online search using any search engine. Some of these are free and used as marketing outlets for vendors, while others charge a fee. Following are some conferences that may be useful for your social networking continued education.
Gravity Summit (www.gravitysummit.com) events help bridge the gap between the new social media marketing tools and the business community. They seek to educate and inform marketing professionals, small business owners, advertisers, c-level executives, and others about the exciting new marketing and communications landscape.
TWTRCON (http://twtrcon.com) is a one-day conference focused entirely on the business use of Twitter. Twitter is transforming business, government, and the nonprofit world. At TWTRCON, you'll see case studies and learn best practices from leading organizations that are using the
real-time web to deliver measurable results. Learn how to use Twitter to listen and respond to customers and stakeholders; find out how micro-blogging can influence opinions; increase organizational collaboration and create new business opportunities; and network and share ideas with leading business, marketing, media, public relations, government executives, key Twitter developers, and social media experts.
At Gartner Portals Content and Collaboration Summit (www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1216614) conference attendees learn how to apply best practices to ensure successful deployments of new workplace technology initiatives and optimize existing investments; leverage existing resources to contain costs, improve productivity, and improve customer relationships; quantify workplace technologies' contribution to the bottom line; and apply the newest technologies to real business situations to innovate.
At Corporate Social Networking Forums (www.corporatesocialnetworking.net) attendees learn how global brands have implemented social networking and get up to speed on the latest tools for social networking.
The Big Design Conference (http://bigdesignconference.com) is an intense day of learning within the scope of strategy, social media, user experience, and code development. Experts from across the country gather to present theories, research, experiences, and best practices to students, professionals, and executives looking to stay on the bleeding edge. The Big Design Conference is a joint venture of the Dallas/Fort Worth Usability Professionals' Association, Refresh Dallas, and the Dallas/Fort Worth Interaction Design Association.
ASTD TechKnowledge (www.astd.org/content/conferences) has been providing attendees with the latest information, best practices, and learning technology resources available since 2001 (see www.astd.org/content/conferences/conferences.htm). Many organizations are leveraging social networking applications to facilitate learning. This is
a great conference to gain insights into technology-enabled learning, including the use of social networking systems.
One note related to conferences: Many of these conferences take place annually. Some have events more than once a year. The best advice is to bookmark information on these conferences and check them regularly as venues, dates, and other information may change. Also because this is an emerging field, new conferences are always being created. Use your favorite search engine to search for “social networking conference” or “social media conference” and you will generate many pages to review.
