Chapter 5. The New Media University: Social Media 202

In the last chapter we reviewed the online provinces of blogs, podcasts, wikis, and virtual worlds. In this chapter, we examine the nuances, risks, applications, and also the merits associated with content communities, social bookmarking, and livecasting.

CROWD-SOURCED CONTENT COMMUNITIES

Online content communities exist to promote the filtering of online information (or manipulation of it, depending on how you look at it). These unique communities are basically social networks that foster connectivity and interactivity around compelling content. The mechanisms and platforms to do so effectively tap the wisdom of the crowds to source, share, and showcase news, videos, pictures, music/audio, and events, powered by the crowd-sourcing of votes to determine popularity and visibility of entries as organized by the specific categories within the network.

These communities serve as a lens into what's hot, interesting, or promising, as dictated by the psychographics that connect demographics. We'll open the curtains to reveal the groups of people powering these networks later in the book.

Leading sites include Reddit, Digg, Mixx, Fark, Yahoo! Buzz, among others. Combined, these networks receive on average 55 million unique visitors. In comparison, CNN.com receives, on average, roughly 30 million unique visitors. Niche content communities exist for almost every vertical industry as well, and here may be more than one resource for you to learn and share with people that can help you and the company your represent.

The practice of curating content is pervasive in these networks, as well as in networks dedicated to social bookmarks (see next section). Conversations transpire in the form of comments and backchan-nel interaction where people usually ask each other for votes or spark private dialogues based on the comments for a particular entry.

Votes serve as forms of support and endorsement, or they can represent discontent or disagreement associated with particular submissions.

These communities receive content from users who submit something that they find interesting on a news site, blog, website, or other social network (YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Photobucket, Picasa, Doc-stoc, etc.) directly into the community—usually by clicking "submit" or a similar command. To simplify the submission and promotion of content in user-curated communities, integrated (or user-installable) tools exist directly in the pages where the content is hosted. For example, if you're reading a news story or blog post, you may be guided to a "Digg This" or other button specific to a particular network of the publisher's choice, in order to either submit a story or vote it up for further visibility. Other aggregated services such as "Share This" enable publishers to offer one tool to connect users to the network of their choice.

The goal, of course, is to earn significant momentum within a finite time period in order to hit the virtual front page, or at the very least, be among the most active within your given category.

The front page of Digg, for example, can yield upwards of 20,000 to 50,000 unique visits in one week to that particular piece of content. And if it's a blog post on your corporate site or a video related to your brand or product, imagine how that traffic could directly convert into leads or prospects.

The activity that sends flurries of votes in any given direction is not always organic. In fact, in some cases, the hustle is calculated or paid. For example, in most social networks, especially Twitter, many of the votes are driven by working with people in specific social graphs to vote as a favor or as an investment, when something is needed in return. On the other hand, to make the front page of Digg, many of the "Power Diggers" will help you for a price ranging from $500 to $2,500 per event. While Digg and other networks are trying to develop code that blocks this type of behavior, the truth is that Power Diggers in Digg and power users in any other network control the majority of the stories that become popular (which can require only 200 to over 1,000 votes to hit the top). Power users are connected and there's incentive for them to leverage their networks to your advantage. Without them, it takes a very organized and orchestrated campaign to submit a story and then drive enough support for it to move naturally—pushed by the people you've aligned in advance to help.

Sometimes it's a combination of leveraging both power networks and the social graph to help push posts to the top.

We each possess the ability to earn significance within social networks—through the give-and-take efforts that serve not only our own needs, but others' needs as well. We can create our own presence and define our social graph through meaningful interaction that achieves goals through the process of always paying it forward.

With the advent of Facebook Connect and Twitter Login, it may now be a bit easier and "affordable." Those networks that allow users to login using Facebook and Twitter will push a notice out to the respective networks and the corresponding followers to alert them to your new submission or vote—thus attracting a new group of visitors to support your efforts.

The wisdom of the crowds begins with curation and is then propelled by word of mouth (WOM) and/or the physical act of endorsing or promoting content within the network and also across the social graph (in other social networks). Everything requires content promotion in order to grab the attention of those who are focused on everything else but what it is you're trying to share with them.

Earn their attention.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

A relative of crowd-powered content-voting communities, social book-marking networks are also powered by user submissions. The more people that bookmark the same thing, the more momentum it earns to make the top lists associated with popularity and tags. Whereas earning the most votes is the primary objective of aggregated content communities, social bookmarking sites are primarily designed to help you collect relevant information from around the Web for your reference and future review, as well as the packaging of interesting links for others who can benefit from curated material.

Not unlike the bookmarks you maintain in online browsers, users save interesting sites, pages, articles, media, and clippings, highlights, and annotations (portions of sites or pages that captivate them and the notes and sections they save and highlight). Aside from the additional features and capabilities, the most notable advantage to social bookmarking networks is the socialization and curation of this qualified material.

Optimization, tagging, and descriptions are critical to establishing presence within their respective networks. That search box that you see in each network is there for a reason, and the results that are returned are governed by the descriptions and tags tied to each piece of information. Like the rest of social media, social-marking sites are grounded, categorized, and defined through folksonomy.

Social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, Diigo, and Stumble-upon, provide a social network for people to save, share, and discover relevant links and bookmarks organized by keywords and descriptions. Sophisticated users looking for specific and qualified results for search topics will visit a social bookmarking site before running a general search in Google or Yahoo!, simply because bookmarks are powered by a human collective of information gatherers who filter only the most interesting items through the manual labor of saving and tagging. It is a valuable source of intelligence mining.

Relevant tags allow other people to discover information, bookmark it on their own, and also read through bookmarks. Tags also serve as the hub for information gathering. Similar to the way many users subscribe to the rich site summary (RSS) feeds of their favorite sites and content producers, subscriptions are also available for tags. I subscribe to the highly focused tags that are important to me and also the companies I represent to get a feel for what is grabbing people's attention and why. Be selective; otherwise you'll turn on yet another fire-hose of information that will make it impossible to gather any value from the experience.

This form of intelligence gathering is also a clever way to introduce branded content into the fray—carefully titled, described, and tagged, of course. Now if you tie this into a syndication system, say a lifestream, for example, each bookmark can then broadcast to other social networks where you've changed the settings to pick up the bookmark feeds (this is true for any social network you wish to extend, as well). This process promotes the saved content beyond the original network to potentially reach new subsets of audiences within the distributed networks.

Purpose-built channels are also an additional way that companies curate important information for consumption by customers, influencers, media and analysts, investors/stakeholders, and employees. This can be done through the creation of individual accounts or through tags. For example, I bookmark everything that I find incredibly interesting and relevant to my world at http://delicious.com/ briansolis. I also save content in this stream that I find interesting for others in social media, using the tag "socialmedia." If I wanted to share this with peers or if followers chose to channel only this content, you'll notice that by clicking this tag in my stream, the URL changes to http://delicious.com/briansolis/socialmedia. Note the tag is now at the end of the URL. The same is true for any tag I use to describe my bookmarks. I maintain tag channels for "PR2.0," "marketing," and "Customer+Service."

Tagging not only organizes information for you and those with whom you share relevant links, but also with those who either follow you or find content because of your tags and definitions.

The backchannel is important in bookmarking networks, just as it is in any social network. Many companies and individuals use this as a way to privately share interesting links with their connections on a one-by-one or group basis.

Another interesting way to use social bookmarks is through the publishing of lists and summaries in microblogs, tumblelogs (Tumblr and Posterous are good examples), and blogs. For example, bloggers leverage social bookmarks to save and share the information of interesting information they collect on the Web for future blog posts. Using the export feature found in many bookmarking networks, blog-gers can simply export their list as a blog post with the ease of cutting and pasting. The blog will automatically pick up and recognize the timeframe or parameters of the bookmarks you wish to share. This comes in handy when you don't necessarily have enough time to write or edit a post, but wish to maintain a rhythm of posting. Other ways to utilize bookmarks are through the creation and publishing of linkblogs, which can republish all of the links you collect and share them as you go. While many individuals and some companies invest in this practice, I strongly suggest you maintain a solidified presence in the bookmarking community that aligns itself with what you represent and channels those links into occasional blog posts.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING EXAMPLE: ADOBE

Adobe tags useful sites and tutorials to their del.icio.us site. Graphic designers, developers, and other Adobe users can find a wealth of information—such as "30 Free Photoshop Swirl Brushes," "25 brilliant wine label designs," "Digital scrapbooking tutorials," and "Flash animation tutorials." Adobe curators collect the best bookmarks around and also accept links from the community. At the time of writing, they have 1,506 links and 2,779 fans in their network.

Adobe saw the power in leveraging the wisdom and experience of the extensive Adobe community. The company recognized that knowledgeable users were providing help and value to other users within the community and wanted to collect and share this collaboration with an even larger pool of users. They've integrated links to their del.icio.us site from the product's help features. It's a win-win-win situation, where general Adobe users can find answers and resources to make the most of their Adobe product, Adobe can keep their customer-base happy without increasing technical support, and expert users receive greater recognition within the community (see http://delicious.com/adobe).

SOCIAL CALENDARS AND EVENTS

Nothing beats participation and relationship building like connecting in the real world!

Social calendaring networks transform e-mail or website-based consumer invitation and RSVP management solutions (such as evite.com) and provide a platform and supporting social network for those hosting or seeking events.

Want to see what your friends are attending?

Care to view upcoming events tied to your keywords in any city around the world?

Social calendar networks facilitate this ability and form paths to identify and connect with real world communities—or, as some refer to it, IRL (in real life).

Facebook events, Upcoming.org, Meetup, Twtvite (tweetups) and Eventful serve as sites that reach potential constituents by introducing or participating in relevant events, sorted by location and by topic/industry. In the case of companies and interest groups, these networks serve as tools to invite people to demos, votes, town halls, open houses, training, webcasts, trade shows, or hosted events, customer spotlights and Q&As, and discussions, among many other occasions and gatherings.

For example, an organization or individual can host and list a particular event within a social calendar network. They can also invite inside and outside network friends to RSVP for the event. As people RSVP, their responses are visible across their social graph (those people connected to them within the social network and those whom have set up their accounts to syndicate their updates across other social networks).

You'll notice that the events in each of the aforementioned services differ in organization, intention, and reach. For instance, Meetup.com is dedicated to recurring themed events. It's a vibrant, geographically expansive network that hosts regular meetups for everything from Web 2.0 to scrapbooking, photography workshops to branded dialogue around issues and opportunities facing particular industries.

I've hosted events for companies in our home cities using Meetup.com as well as Upcoming.org to experiment with event formulas, formats, and audiences that offer the most impact and value for attending guests while still also building acommunity that extends from online to the real world. The idea was to create an event that appealed to customers, prospects, partners, and influencers to share and learn together—as well as to serve as an installment series that provides ongoing insight and brings up the most critical questions and concerns permeating the industry.

We invited customers and industry experts to speak about industry trends, challenges, and solutions, as well as answer questions related to the real-world experiences of those in the audience. Using Meetup.com, we're able to create a branded "event" that created a microcommunity within the larger community of users looking for related events. The goal was to find a format that proved effective, and that could be used locally on a monthly or quarterly basis, and create a template that could be reproduced by appointed ambassadors around the country in order to provide resources and solutions for communities of users IRL. You wouldn't believe the power of pizzas, beverages, beer, and wine. The value was less in the splendor and extravagance of the event, but more in the structure, flow, and information presented each evening.

We also experimented with events where we utilized a combination of Upcoming.org, Facebook events, and Twitter for additional visibility to point back to one or both of the event hubs. Each network boasts its own group of contacts. Crossover may exist, but for the most part, distinct connections are anchored to each community. Contacts discovered and shared the events within their own networks and when combined with those targeted prospects who also discovered the affairs through search, the results were always outstanding—to the point of having to close sign-up lists and/or turn people away.

Another popular trend for meetups or tweetups centers on blog-gers, local influencers, and visiting authorities who are in town for an event or conference.

As companies recognize the value, opportunity, and potential of blogger relations and engagement, extending a virtual hand to introduce bloggers to key executives is instrumental in establishing effective relationships that can potentially garner attention and coverage in the future.

People are actively searching for relevant events. In order to reach them, we must earn a presence in the networks where they seek intelligence. It is imperative for every company to proactively and personally recognize bloggers as important to your business—not only for pitching stories, but also for establishing dialogue. Respect and admiration are not simply sentiments, they can be effective building blocks for strong relationships.

Building relationships within these communities, promoting events among those they benefit, and utilizing the right tags and descriptions all play important roles increating and attracting visibility.

Hosting events in the real world, even if they're organized on the Social Web, transcends online interactions and builds bona fide, real-world relationships—in fact, it ratifies them. Creating and arranging events within social networks connects true ambassadors and advocates through the powerful and influential fusion of the social graph.

Creating an event in Facebook, Upcoming.org, Meetup.com, or Twtvite, provides a public forum for people who already looking for pertinent gatherings and affairs qualified by keywords and location. As a brand seeking to connect with local consumers, offering opportunities to connect, learn, and collaborate in-person goes a long way toward engendering loyalty and fostering communities in the online and offline worlds.

As people RSVP for the event, it triggers an in-and cross-network update that can reverberate and resonate within the existing network by automatically generating status updates that appears on the radar screens (timelines) of their friends and contacts. For instance, if you RSVP for a particular event in Facebook, I would see that activity in my timeline, "YOU have RSVPd for X event." The idea is that it would most likely motivate me to click-through to view additional details about the event. This activity can also send updates to outside networks such as Twitter and Facebook, to reach an entirely different set of contacts. Did you know that over 2.5 million events are created each month within Facebook?

If you are organizing an event, it's important to leverage the Social Web to not only orchestrate activities and guests, but also to promote the event as it's occurring. It's highly recommended that you establish a short and recognizable hashtag to encourage participants to tweet or share their updates with a classifier that helps promote the event brand. If the event generates enough updates, it could potentially set the stage for a keyword to earn a spot in the top-trending topics in any related social networks. It's also critical that a person or persons on the organizing team monitors these conversations and updates as they're published, in order to monitor for sentiment, mood, perception, spirit, and the overall tenor and flavor of the function.

LIVECASTING

There was a time when only the most prosperous companies had access to the tools and services to shoot, edit, and broadcast audio/video.

Over recent years, the Social Web has sparked incredible innovation, substantially reducing the barriers to entry and the associated costs for creating and publishing online audio and video. Essentially, companies are building full-fledged content networks online that can air live or episodic videos on demand.

As a result, a rising and dedicated class of video networks exists that facilitates the creation and hosting of live and prerecorded video channels that entwine conversations around media.

Live video communities such as Veodia, Ustream, BlogTV, and Justin.tv, among others, enable livecasting and chatroom interactivity. Services such as Qik and Mogulus also allow for livecasting, in addition to offering the ability to broadcast video and support chatroom functionality from a mobile phone. Viewers can enjoy the videos from any PC or mobile device.

Live audio also represents a growing opportunity to reach important markets. Services such as BlogTalkRadio provide a sophisticated, but simple, toolkit for livecasting hosted audio discussions, similar to a radio talk show format. Imagine hosting a weekly interview series with executives, customers, or market experts to share insights and direction with your community while revealing the personalities driving the business.

Livecasting networks also share many similarities with traditional social networks. Inherent in each network is a community of active and growing affiliates and associates. Users can "friend" other members to connect with each other to form micronetworks of contacts to interact in and around scheduled or spontaneous programming.

The new tools for creating and sharing content in these nouveau forums are most likely already in your technology toolbox. Today's fixed or mobile production studio can effectively run from any desktop or notebook computer, a fixed network connection, or a mobile Web broadband device for mobile casts, and either a webcam, camcorder, or mobile phone with video capability. For audio, many broadcasters choose USB studio microphones to ensure quality.

Many companies that I've worked with or observed have effectively leveraged these services to webcast training sessions, earnings reports, live chats with key personnel and special guests, HR and executive announcements, product reviews, marketing or industry events, lectures, and conference discussions, speeches, panels, and so on. Employees, partners, and customers can view and chat with one another during the sessions to ask and answer questions and solicit feedback. In every interaction, you're investing in and building a dedicated community of appreciative and loyal subscribers and patrons.

EVENT LIVECASTING EXAMPLE: OFFICE 2.0 CONFERENCE

Office 2.0, a conference centering around enterprise adoption of Office 2.0 technologies, was held in San Francisco in September 2008. The event was witnessed by show attendees and, thanks to livecast-ing, by a global audience as well. Veodia recorded and live-streamed the conference tracks and sessions. Hundreds of event attendees were able to watch sessions right from their conference-sponsored iPhones, and countless others were able to check in from around the world.

Livecasting let Office 2.0 expand its reach beyond those individuals able to attend the event in person. And the conference and Veodia made each session recording embeddable in blogs, wikis, and Web pages. A speaker could then include a high-quality recording of the session on his or her blog or company website—to keep the conversation going after the last day of the show and thus increase visibility of Office 2.0 for the speaker's own followers and audience.

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