Now you have some appreciation of the social media landscape, and before I get you started on a social media network, I need to establish who the key players are in some depth. You probably know Bebo is vaguely for young people and Facebook started as a business application, but by the end of this chapter, if you read it all the way through, you're going to be an expert in all of them.
This is not an exhaustive list. Wikipedia has a list of 150 social networks and you don't need them all. Even if you take the ones devoted to dating and teenagers out of it, and then arbitrarily exclude the non-English language models, you're still in three figures. I've therefore been selective. I'm listing nothing niche, and nothing that looks too unbusinesslike (so the extremely popular music services last.fm and Spotify don't qualify). English-language services that are more popular overseas I've also disallowed, so there's no Orkut in here (apologies to Indian and Brazilian readers, who probably love this Google-owned service). Services that have been huge but have been up for sale for months with no buyer are likewise excluded, with apologies to FriendsReunited (which was sold off as this book went to press but whose future plans have yet to be announced – I'm expecting some sort of relaunch).
You'll get more out of this chapter if you look at it for reference; look stuff up when you need it, not before. I'm going to be very strict with the format, too; name, what it is, audience, how to get involved, applications and add-ons, hints and tips.
So here we are, the main players in alphabetical order.
One of the earliest of the current batch of social networking sites, Bebo was founded in 2005 and its name stands for 'Blog Early, Blog Often.' It marketed itself initially as an extension of college and high school, a tendency that increased when it was acquired by AOL. People with existing AOL accounts and Skype accounts can now add them to their Bebo log-ins. It's noted for being the place where the award-winning drama KateModern originated.
If you're not into multimedia, video and music, do yourself a favour – forget Bebo right now. Bebo is one of the places on which people like to display their creative wares. It's creative, creative, creative. A company marketing videos or one marketing products that lend themselves to being demonstrated would do well on Bebo; a company selling cattle feed frankly wouldn't.
The question is whether Bebo's going to be superseded by YouTube at some point. The jury remains out on that one, although its main competitor has until now been MySpace.
Although the majority of social networking participants in 2008 were over 35, Bebo remains true to its roots and has a large percentage of teenagers taking part. It's possibly among the most focused social media sites there is. It's pretty rigidly dedicated to leisure time as well; there's little room for serious content.
Bebo and the Bebo logo are trademarks of Bebo, Inc. Used with Permission.
A rigidly defined group of young users, one of the best defined on the Internet. As long as Bebo continues to grow, at least a little, this should be a gift to marketeers in the area.
First, make sure you have plenty of creative goodies to offer, whether that's music or video.
Second, go to www.bebo.co.uk and hit the button marked 'Sign up'.
Tip
Web browsers
Most PCs come with Internet Explorer as the default web browser, most Macs with Safari. It can be worth having a second browser installed for two reasons: if there's a software problem with the first you're not stuck, and websites can display differently on different browsers. Firefox (www.firefox.com) is an excellent alternative and works across all common hardware platforms; Flock (www.flock.com) is a tweak of Firefox that aims to accommodate social media better than most. Both are worth looking at. The pictures throughout this section were taken using Google's Chrome, another free download, on a Mac running Windows.
You're taken to a simple form: put your details in and fill in the box with the letters they're displaying to prove you're not an automatic spam machine. The next screen asks you to invite your friends to join your network. You've now joined and can start filling more details in.
The most important elements for you will be the picture box and the video box. Once you have a video on your computer, you can upload it immediately by using this box; click 'upload' and it'll ask where on your computer the file is. Find it, click 'upload' and it'll do just that. It's all very straightforward.
Very few, but you can go into the menu on the top left-hand corner of your start page and get a button for your website that will take people straight to your homepage on Bebo.
Be creative.
Be ready to engage – this is not an audience that will respond well to a sales pitch, most of them are teenagers.
Be patient. This isn't a natural place to do business. The market is there and you can establish a lot in terms of branding, but 'please buy my product' is going to get you abuse and not much else.
Blellow was a very new service as this book went to print. It's American, as are most of them, and it has only a handful of UK customers. This may or may not change; it's impossible to tell at this stage.
Without wishing to belittle the efforts of the owners to do something different, you could usefully describe Blellow as a sort of Twitter lookalike for the business world. Rather than 'What Are You Doing Now?' its catchline is 'What Are You Working On?'
Blellow looks and feels a lot like Twitter when you first sign up. The emphasis is on short text-only messages, accompanied by an optional mugshot. People mostly use genuine pictures rather than the more idiosyncratic 'personality' pictures favoured by those on more 'social' social networking sites.
Dig a little deeper and there's a lot more to Blellow, although given the newness of the service and the consequent minimal number of users there's more potential than actual stuff happening. You can, for example, set up a group – you can do this on Twitter as well, but it's not as clearly signalled for the first-time user from the home page. There is also a tab for starting a discussion about a specific project for which you're seeking help, or advertising a job, or setting up a meeting. There is also the inevitable blog about what's happening with the service; again, dig deeper and you'll find this in most of the services under discussion, but Blellow makes it a lot easier to find.
All Blellow lacks is a significant number of people, which wouldn't be fair to expect at this early stage. It has all the right ingredients in place to become a very useful place: the market will decide what happens.
Blellow is determined that it's going to be a business meeting place and its structures and spaces for meetings and so on suggests it's going the right way about it. The design and opportunity to network with like-minded people indicate that it's going to be the smaller rather than the larger company that's going to take part; as a jobbing freelance I'd find it very useful if people put up work opportunities for me, for example, but a larger company is likely to look for an agency for one-off project work.
The people currently using the site have an informal view of their professional roles; they are there as people first, companies second. This is a pretty typical view of social networkers, but in Blellow's case they have an idea of why they're there rather than just 'having a look around'.
Blellow represents an excellent networking and marketing opportunity for smaller businesses who don't know where else to go for help just yet, although not knowing where to go might be a symptom of a bigger business problem. Assuming it grows, it should be able to take the best elements of many of the other networks and apply them to the business world.
Joining Blellow is free and very simple indeed. The home page at www.blellow.com has a sign-up button.
Click on it and choose a user name and password. You'll then be sent a link to click and activate your account. The next page you'll see offers to check your Twitter contacts, Gmail contacts and others to see whether you know anyone who's already on the service. Entering your passwords on this site appears to be safe.
After this or clicking the 'No thanks I'll do that later' button you reach the dashboard. At this stage, unless you've added people through Twitter, AOL or the other services as outlined above, you'll have a pretty dull screen in front of you telling you that you have 0 followers, 0 messages and basically no mates, because nobody knows you're there. You can add a photo by clicking on the photo icon, but we're going to click 'Create my profile'. You can see both of these below.
You'll be taken to the profile screen. Be brief: describing what you do is limited to 50 words and it's what people will see when they click through for more details.
Hit 'Save' and your account settings will be updated automatically. Click back to the home tab and you can make your first entry and please, please don't just tell people you're joining Blellow, everyone does that on every social network for their first message. Have a look at the 'Group' section, see what's relevant to you in there and join a few; there's a UK group, which is small for the moment.
Very few for the moment. At the time of writing you could download a Blellow 'Follow me' button for your website but unlike (for example) Facebook and LinkedIn, this is purely an image and it's up to you to turn it into a hyperlink to your home page on the system (which will be http://blellow.com/yourusername). Presumably the equivalents of Tweetdeck and other applications (see Twitter below) will emerge if the market demands it.
You have longer to express yourself than you would on Twitter (300 characters here), but don't waffle.
It's a small and friendly group; depending on how quickly it grows it could be some time before you get any useful feedback for business, but it could well be a grower.
As of mid-2009 the system is still in beta and it crashed once during the course of this book being written. These glitches should be ironed out as the network matures.
In 1999 a company called Pyra Labs started up doing other stuff, but it made a piece of software called Blogger. This stood for web-logger, and the idea was that people could collect links, assemble their thoughts and share them with anyone who happened along.
1999 is a lifetime ago on the Internet and Blogger, now owned by Google, has been joined by WordPress, Windows Live Spaces, TypePad and numerous other sites offering blogging and hosting combined.
You log on, you set up an account and you blog. It really is as easy as that. You don't have to worry about setting up an RSS Feed, Blogger does it all for you: people just click the RSS button on your blog and it starts sending your posts to their email or newsreader, whatever they want to do.
Note
RSS: Really Simple Syndication. Never mind the technical widgetry, if you have an RSS feed on your blog people can subscribe to it and keep up to date whether they're on your site or not. Remember this when you set up a blog; if you have subscribers they'll know if you haven't blogged for months.
You're free to add pictures, videos, anything you wish to your blog posts as long as you think your client group will be interested. There are a number of templates available so you can make your site look businesslike, and if you buy a domain name from somewhere like easily.co.uk, then you can have it pointing straight at your blog so the customer thinks they're looking at yourblog.co.uk rather than yourblog.blogger.co.uk. Watch out, though, this can confuse search engines because you're forwarding and they might downgrade your site on their list as a result.
Absolutely anyone can look at a blog hosted by the major companies outlined above. The target audience will be decided by the blogger themselves; the disadvantage of this, such as it is, is that the owner of a business-related blog might well find themselves trying to market a blog as well as their core product or service.
Don't be put off. In WordPress, for example, you're encouraged to set up links with fellow bloggers and they'll start linking to you if you're relevant. If you have something interesting to say and can start letting the social networking community know about it, people will start to pay attention. As long as your objective is branding that's great; if you're looking for increased sales then clearly the content is what's going to make the difference (do look at a few blogs, though; you'll find very few of them include overt sales messages).
The opportunity to get your blog straight to the desktop or mobile phone of your customer and prospective customer, which is a communications tool you'll control and won't be filtered through journalists, designers or anyone else.
First a disclaimer: I'm focusing on Blogger here purely because it's first alphabetically. The competition logically deserves an entry in its own right, but the content of these entries would be so repetitious it wouldn't be worth the reader's while. So please take it as read that with very slight variations the following apply to WordPress and the rest of the blog-hosting sites.
Start by going to the home page at blogger.com.
You'll see they've made it really easy to register while you're in the process of starting your blog. Click 'Create Your Blog Now' and get on to the 'Create your page' section. If you have a Google account, simply use that; otherwise set up a Blogger account.
You'll be taken to a page asking you to name your blog (easy) and to give it an address on the web. This is where the headaches start, as all the best ones have gone by now. While setting up a dummy account for demonstration purposes for this book, I found that socialnetworkingblog.blogspot.com had gone, as had socialnetworking.blogspot.com; I was able to set up www.thisissocialnetworking.blogspot.com, but it's hardly catchy.
You're offered a choice of template. Click the one you want; I opted for 'Snapshot', but there's a fair selection. The blog is now created: simple as that. Press the 'Start blogging' button and you have the screen below.
You can now just start typing if you wish; you might also want to adjust the layout. Read the 'Monetize' section for how to add Google Ads really quickly. The Layouts tab is also worth checking: look for 'Add a gadget' by which you can add pictures, adverts from Google AdSense, all manner of things. You can also edit the raw HTML code of your blog, which can become very important when you're looking at factors like search engine optimization (SEO) and adding tags so that people can find you.
Note
Search engine optimization: structuring the text and underlying code of your website so the search engines will list it prominently.
Play with it – there are loads of ways to make a great deal out of a blog.
The beauty of blogging systems is that it's always possible to customize; they offer you a choice on the page. Check the 'Gadgets' box under 'Layouts' and add advertising, video, whatever you like.
Check the section in this book on SEO and being found (Chapter 4) and make sure you're make all the right moves so that people will actually find you.
Make sure you have something to say before you start, there's nothing worse than a dead and deserted blog.
Think also about whether you want to be hosted or self-hosted; see the next chapter.
The essence of social networking is participation (that'll be the 'social' bit, he observed brilliantly) and if you want to participate then you'll need to share some stuff. This is where the sharing sites come into their own. Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon: there are simply loads of sites that will allow you to share content with other people. Remember, though, the idea is to share content from other sites rather than your own.
This can still be useful in a business sense. You might want to bookmark something your customers will find interesting; if they get used to coming to your site for interesting bookmarks, then they're on your site regularly. What you can switch-sell them to look at after they've arrived is of course up to you.
Naturally, all these services are different. StumbleUpon is technically a software add-on to the Firefox Internet browser, and once you've installed it and set up an account it will start sending people wherever you want them to go. You can click for other people's choices of site, too. This is more of a leisure thing than a business function; you know nothing about the other members and might not want to see their choices.
Digg focuses more on community and feedback on sites than most of the other bookmark services, and of course you don't want to spend too much professional time servicing another community. For the purposes of this chapter, then, we'll look at Delicious, simply because it's easy to set up and to add a list of useful links to your blog or website, changing them with a single click.
The social sharing sites have one thing in common: their members are social types and have already bought into the idea of sharing everything useful with everyone else. This means they're ready to receive stuff from you, but they probably won't be on your Delicious account page looking for things. You need to make people aware that you've added material by shouting about it on your website; tell people you're sharing stuff, and go to http://addthis.com to get a button so that people can add your site to their own sharing network with a single click.
Note
Stickiness is a marketing term, meaning the incentive people have to come back again and again; if the content keeps changing and you send them somewhere interesting every time they turn up, they'll keep coming back.
Although it is primarily aimed at individuals wanting to share their interesting links, a bookmarking service can add a lot to the 'stickiness' of your website.
Go to http://delicious.com for a start, obviously. On the top right-hand corner, click the 'Join now' panel. You're invited to put in your first name, last name, email details and so forth, and there's a check box with text for you to identify (it cuts down on spammers).
You will then be asked to add some buttons to your web browser. This is an important step. It won't affect the smooth running of your computer and there have been no cases of anyone having their security compromised by doing this, but it's these add-ons that allow you to bookmark things and then find your bookmarks. Literally drag and drop the blue lettering up to your Internet browser's toolbar and it'll install in a split second.
Reproduced with permission of Yahoo! Inc. ©2009 Yahoo! Inc. Delicious and the Delicious logo are registered trademarks of Yahoo! Inc.
You can then import any bookmarks you might already have in a file. To bookmark any website and save it to your Delicious account, simply click the 'Bookmark on Delicious' text you've just dragged to your toolbar while you have the desired page on screen. To view your bookmarks, click the 'My Delicious' text that you also dragged there.
Slightly more clever and, surprisingly, not immediately easy to find as they're buried in the 'Help' pages, are the extra little widgets you can attach to your own website to make people aware you're using the system. Log onto your Delicious account and type the address http://delicious.com/help/linkrolls and you'll find the one that I suggest is most useful. This gives you the screen below, using a dummy account I set up for the book and one bookmark (in this case the BBC News page).
Reproduced with permission of Yahoo! Inc. ©2009 Yahoo! Inc. Delicious and the Delicious logo are registered trademarks of Yahoo! Inc.
You can see from the preview that cutting and pasting the code in the box onto my website would show a selection of my Delicious bookmarks, an exhortation to people to follow me and my Delicious user name. So people coming to my website know they'll get a look at some of the stuff I find interesting. Now, think about some of the hypothetical businesses we discussed earlier in the book, for example the ancient music specialist, who can now click a little box on her browser during her research and automatically link to material that her customers will find interesting.
There are a number of third-party applications for Delicious and other similar sites; buttons other than the ones the companies themselves offer, aggregators that get groups of accounts displaying on the one screen. For business purposes I'd recommend keeping things simple.
Have fun with Delicious, but remember that anything you bookmark will reflect on your business.
Remember to keep things up to date; if it looks as though all your links are ancient your site will look dated too.
Remember also that you don't have to share your links: you're welcome to use Delicious as a private bookmarking site and not tell anyone about it or put links on your own site. You'll be missing many of the benefits if you do this, though.
Ecademy has been established since 1998 and is aimed squarely at the business community. If you're selling to other businesses it could well be worth joining; if your business sells to the consumer community only I'd skip this section (and LinkedIn a little later). Ecademy's a little different from many of the other networks listed in this chapter because it doesn't perceive itself as purely dedicated to electronic networking; getting people meeting face to face and collaborating is one of its declared objectives.
Ecademy aims to link people up and get them working together, it's as simple as that. All of its members are businesspeople and it has targeted smaller organizations in particular. A businesslike, text-based system, you need an idea of what you're doing here and why; there are fewer helpful signposts around the place than might be expected in a more consumer-friendly environment.
Businesspeople only. Not that they police it particularly carefully, but anyone other than a business customer is going to lose interest in what's going on very quickly. This isn't a criticism. The design is bordering on austere, the text-only nature of the contacts is offputting for fun-seekers, the news section is targeted towards businesspeople.
Ecademy offers a network every bit as targeted as Bebo, but with a radically different target. It's also directly into competition with LinkedIn, as we'll see a little later. The drawback with Ecademy is that you're asked to pay for a number of services that other networks offer free of charge.
There's a rigidly defined set of fellow networkers and little waffle on the site. The come-ons for money are atypical of social networking but may be a sign of what's coming; there's a debate about just how long this stuff can stay free for.
The opening screen couldn't be clearer. There is no messing about on details of how wonderful the website is, you just join up on the home page.
You'll then receive a code that you can cut and paste into the next screen, and alternately a link to click on: either of those things will confirm your membership of the network.
The first thing you're invited to do is to ask other people to join; this, as in the other examples that ask you for the same thing, is an attempt to grow the business. Don't think for a minute that you're obliged to nominate colleagues unless you think they'd be pleased.
On the left-hand side of the page just after you've logged in you'll find a number of options. The first thing to do is to click on your profile. The site doesn't let you at it immediately but offers you a range of paid services, including having your profile searchable on Google and the right to start a blog (for PowerNetworkers, £11.95 a month as this book went to print).
You may have noticed that Google submission and the right to start as many blogs as you want are free on such blogging systems as WordPress and Windows Live.
Tip
What's in a name?
OK, so why should you want to pay for an Ecademy blog when you can get them free from elsewhere? There may actually be some good reasons. If you're a professional company selling goods or services to blue-chip clients, the idea of having an obvious off-the-shelf blog address might not appeal to you. You may wish to make the statement implicit in paying for a blog that you care a little more about your image. I think you're crazy, but it matters to some.
Further charges apply to people wanting extra analytics and the ability to drum up more business in a targeted way. We'll assume that you want the free version for the moment. Click the 'No thanks, I'll take free membership' button and it takes you to another screen where you can complete your profile (which actually we asked to do two screens ago, but never mind).
The screen helps you through the process by highlighting the bits that are really going to matter in red. Type in your profile, then save it. There is also a link on the left of the page to help you manage keywords and SEO, and also to links and banners for your website (note: some of these have more to do with Ecademy advertising than anything else).
There is then the option to look at your messages, but above all to join 'clubs' and start interacting with other members with the same interests. This is where the interaction really starts.
Ecademy is pretty much a self-contained site, and other than banners for your own site there isn't a lot that's going to add any significant value to your experience of it.
Note
Lurking is watching a website or debate without joining in.
Lurk for a while and get the hang of what the other members are likely to expect before launching in with a service or sales pitch.
Join a few clubs and interest groups; you might well make some interesting contacts.
Don't be too critical because the company feels it has to charge for its services. As recently as June 2009 there was speculation that all of these companies would eventually have to charge, or else why run a social network? If Ecademy has simply pulled ahead of the pack and submitted to the inevitable, fair enough. You charge for what you do, after all. LinkedIn also has a paid-for premium version and at the time of writing there were rumours that Twitter would be launching one as well.
Facebook was arguably the site that got social networking moving in the first place. In spite of what I said in the introduction, during which we discussed how Cix, Compuserve and others had started way before it was called social networking, it was only once a large number of people had broadband Internet connections that the idea became widely accepted. Facebook's rise more or less coincided with the social media revolution.
In spite of what you've heard about Twitter in the press, Facebook remains the largest social network to date in terms of sheer numbers. There is a greater opportunity to talk to more people here than anywhere else, if you know what you're doing.
Facebook began as an academic idea, as indeed did the Internet itself. Facebook was intended to keep alumni of a college in touch with each other when they didn't have the time to stay in touch properly. It soon spread beyond academia and supplanted a number of paid-for means of keeping in touch with old colleagues, however. Following this it moved outside colleges all together and is now used by huge numbers of people trying to keep in touch.
The updates you're likely to put up are normally text only. There will be room for people to comment on these updates once they've adopted you as a 'friend'. You'll have the opportunity to put video and photo content on the site as well, and the chance to exchange private as well as public messages.
Essentially Facebook is one of the more complex social networking environments, but potentially very rewarding once you really have its strengths and weaknesses straight in your mind.
As with a lot of social networking sites, the surprise for people with preconceptions about who's using this stuff is that the fastest-growing group on Facebook as at 2009 was the middle aged and indeed the elderly. The number of 35–44 year olds grew 276.4 percent in the six months to April 2009, while the 55+ market grew 194.3 percent over the same period; 55 per cent of users are female. The source of this information was www.istrategylabs.com, which revisits the research every six months, so if you want a really up-to-date picture, check it online.
There are a couple of things of which you can be reasonably certain on Facebook. First, it has a lot more bells and whistles – or complications, as some people might call them – than Twitter. This means that a real computer novice is likely to be slightly put off. Second, though, the vast number of people who do get there are going to be more inclined to spend some time on the site, whether looking at some of the messages, updating their status or playing one of the many games available. There are clear opportunities for a business wanting to promote itself through, say, a branded game, or taking out an advertisement on the site. More people, more eye time, more branding. Simple.
Facebook is the largest social network and the one of which your customers are most likely to be members already. If you decide social networking is for you, then it won't be a matter of 'Have you got a Facebook Group' but 'Why aren't you on Facebook?'
Like a lot of the networks under discussion, getting onto Facebook is simple. Go to www.facebook.com and enter your name, address and email details where prompted. You'll get a confirmation email to say you've joined. Click the link on the email and you're in.
You can now log on using your name and password. The next thing to do is to set up your profile so that people can get the hang of who you are. This might not be as straightforward as it sounds, as there is a lot of information to choose from.
The first section, basic information, is as it says on the tin, basic, but watch it. Declare your sex, OK, people will see that from your picture, but remember to hide your date of birth (you can do that from a drop-down box) – identity thieves are watching and the more information you've made public the easier it is for them. Home town and home neighbourhood, again, I'd avoid unless you're talking about business premises. Political views, marital status, religious views and whether you're interested in men, women or dating are likewise going to be irrelevant; leave the free text bits blank and click 'Networking' only.
The next stage is 'Personal information'; hobbies, interests, favourite films, that sort of thing. If you want friends to get in touch with you that's fine; if you want to keep your profile businesslike then your collection of Osmonds records is your business and no one else's. Contact information, the next tab, is also worth watching for privacy breaches, although if you haven't gone ex-directory it would be absurd to withhold your phone number from Facebook; your education experience is likewise nobody's business but your own unless you choose to share it. I really don't want to sound alarmist, but public information on Facebook really can be a goldmine for identity thieves.
At this stage the temptation is to start playing around with all the 'harmless' little bits of code and games you're offered, but my advice is don't. I did: let me make that mistake for you. A load of fellow journalists said they'd started playing a game called 'Zombies', which consists largely of sending messages to people saying you've been chomped by a zombie. Worse, it appears on your home page: 'Guy Clapperton has been chomped by a zombie', it says. Worse is the 'Compare people' application, a game that lets your friends rate your best qualities. I'm pleased to say I came out as a good listener, reliable...and I get a monthly email saying that none of my female friends wants to date me. Oh, and apparently I'm more like Patrick Troughton, the second Doctor Who, than any of the others, and there's a list of books I've read and intend to read.
For a freelance it's not so bad to be thought of as a little frivolous from time to time. For other businesses – say you were an undertaker – it could be very bad indeed. My suggestion would be to do a search for people you know or for your customers and add them to your list – they'll have to approve this – then watch their updates. If they're serious users then you can start a Facebook group: upload your logo, hit 'Start a group' and the site opens a closed area for you. You can then invite people to join the group, and they can share ideas and thoughts.
Be careful. The thoughts about your business they want to share may be negative. Or no one may want to join, and nothing looks worse for you than a Facebook group without any participants. The other thing Facebook will do is suggest people for you to add to your friends list and it has some strange ideas as to why you'd be interested. It's offered me several people as 'friends' I probably know because, well, they live in London too.
There are a number of technical additions that can make Facebook a little simpler for the user. If you want to keep up with your friends' (or customers', or competitors') updates but don't want to be on Facebook the whole time, have a look at Seesmic (www.seesmic.com) and download it. It reads the messages and presents them to you in a small box. Tweetdeck (www.tweetdeck.com) will do the same with both Facebook and the people you're following on Twitter. You can use this to synchronize your tweets and updates as well.
There are a huge number of games and applications that Facebook itself makes available to you. The vast majority are aimed at the leisure user rather than the business user so watch out; they can take up a lot of your time.
Facebook was invented as a social application; don't be surprised when it turns out not to be designed for business use.
As this book went to press, Facebook bought FriendFeed (see the next entry). It also launched a sort of 'Facebook Lite', which looked a lot like a Twitter competitor.
If you're setting up a Facebook group, don't underestimate the time and effort it's going to take to supervise it and pull together some sort of online community. These things don't just happen, much though we might all wish they did!
Friendfeed, recently bought by Facebook, has taken some of the more popular features of other social networking sites and come out with something slightly different. Aimed at the consumer or small business, it can be a flexible way of working on a document within your organization as well as getting new customers or communicating with existing ones.
Friendfeed is one of those networks that's really got the hang of internetworking with other log-ins. Far from competing with Twitter and Facebook, it allows you to use your Twitter, Facebook or Google log-in to join the service. I used Twitter; it asked for my Twitter log-on, then checked again that it was OK to use it, then started reading my Twitter feed for me. It also checked my Facebook contacts when I asked it to and I have no doubt it would do the same with my Googlemail contacts as well.
According to data from Quantcast, Friendfeed appeals to a predominantly young audience that's slightly male dominated, 45–55 percent compared to 10 percent female. The audience also likes gaming websites.
Note
Aggregation: bringing feeds from a number of social networks and displaying them on one screen.
It's a convenient way of aggregating and sorting out a selection of different news and information feeds.
If you're a member of Googlemail, Twitter or Facebook already, then by far the easiest way of joining is to use one of these log-ons. Friendfeed will import and aggregate as many of your contacts as you want, in a constantly updated stream that looks a lot like a Twitter feed.
The extra value it offers lies both in bringing the feeds together (hence the name, I guess!) and in the ability to start and join groups. The 'Groups' link on the right of the page allows you to join interest groups, comment on what they're looking at and doing and – as long as you do it subtly and add some sort of value – mention that you're an expert in a given field, or that you sell something in which the people in the group might be interested.
You can also create a group. This can be closed, so your staff can join and use it as a closed intranet within your organization.
The groups have a handy guide to how many posts they receive on average, so if you join one with about six posts a day you can be certain there won't be any major overhead in keeping up with it.
As this book went to press, Facebook bought Friendfeed. Neither company had announced how this would affect the service but you can be sure it'll be folded into Facebook somehow.
LinkedIn predates both Twitter and Facebook and if you're in the business-to-business sector then it's a must. If you sell primarily to consumers, then they're less likely to be interested in joining a purpose-built business network.
One of the prime features of LinkedIn is that it involves a bit more work in terms of searching people out and making contact with them. It is down to you to make contact with people and to make it work. That said, the people who are involved are much more likely to be in listening mode for business proposals. They'll have had you recommended to them by one of their colleagues (you can't just look them up and send a proposal, you need to be endorsed by one of your contacts who's also on LinkedIn).
Anyone who has heard the old adage about everyone being connected to actor Kevin Bacon by six degrees of separation will understand the principle that sparked LinkedIn off. It wasn't a group thing like Facebook and the others, it was a matter of joining and inviting contacts to join, who'd then do the same and see who they knew. Eventually the scheme grew so that if you were interested in talking to someone interesting – say me – you could see whether I was on LinkedIn, then see whether a colleague of a colleague of a colleague knew me. You then put in a request for an introduction.
It has evolved since then: you can update your status just as you can with Twitter and Facebook, and you can start discussion groups.
LinkedIn is a business-only site. This has several advantages, not least of which is that people getting a contact through it are expecting to be tapped for favours or to receive a sales pitch. According to recent figures from Techcrunch, the demographic is about 64 percent male and the average age is 41; you can imagine the sex balance evening out and the age lowering gradually as a generation accustomed to living and breathing social networking gets older.
LinkedIn is a ready-made business network including high-value individuals, with no waffle and no charges.
By now you'll know the basic routine: sign up, set up an account and fill in your profile, remembering that you're in a professional rather than a personal environment.
Of all of the social networks, LinkedIn probably takes up the most work because you have to actively look for people who're going to interest you, and make requests to contact them through intermediaries. Once you've taken the trouble, the personal response you're likely to get more than makes up for this.
The process is pretty simple: you search for the name of a person you want to contact and if they're on LinkedIn, the system tells you how many degrees of separation there are between you and that person. So you send a contact message – the content is up to you – and this goes to the person you know, asking them to forward it, then they forward it to the person they know, and so on until it gets to the person you want to contact.
That's the service with which it launched, but the site has grown. You can now start a LinkedIn group, either for your company or for a professional interest group. The following is a sample LinkedIn prepared earlier by way of illustration, concerning its own business.
It's also worth mentioning that LinkedIn not only allows you to build up a profile, as you can see from the column on the left, but you can leave a recommendation for someone with whom you've worked and they can leave recommendations for you.
It's possible to link updates from LinkedIn with those from other networks, but I really wouldn't. Mixing updates is now handled very easily by the Yoono add-on (I promise I am not making these names up) to the Firefox web browser, but the cultures are very different: LinkedIn users won't expect the personal stuff you're likely to add to Facebook, and Facebook members in turn don't appreciate the sheer number of updates that come their way if you've linked your Twitter account and want to keep the two in sync.
Like many of the sites and networks discussed in this chapter, LinkedIn allows you to link to your profile from your own website. So it's possible to get a sort of extended CV online with recommendations and references already built in from people with whom you've worked, which people can find with a single click from your usual site. For professionals this is likely to be much more useful than, for example, a Facebook page.
Remember that LinkedIn's a business network and be flexible about moving business matters onto it. A colleague of mine started a group for technology PR people and journalists on Facebook and found hardly anyone turned up; she moved it to LinkedIn and within days it was a lively forum because that's where people expected to go for work-related items.
By the same token, don't choke up your LinkedIn profile with irrelevant updates. It's a work thing and nobody on this network wants to know what you had for breakfast.
Take the time to seek people out through mutual connections. LinkedIn can provide a quasi-vetting process, by which the people between you and your contact will filter out time wasters so they'll probably take you seriously when your contact message arrives.
MySpace is often dismissed in the media as the one that came before Facebook and Twitter, but don't write it off; in America alone it had more than 60 million regular members as this book went to print. Granted, a few months earlier it was closer to 70 million, but if your services or goods are aimed at young people who upload music and video and want a forum on which to discuss it, that's a hell of a sizeable lump of people to risk ignoring.
MySpace shares much in common with YouTube on the surface, in that you can share a great deal of content such as music and videos. There are offers of tickets to gigs, ads for the latest movies (often with loud sounds; don't go to MySpace in a busy office without headphones unless you can justify it, as your writer found out when a voice explaining there was a new Terminator film issued forth on his first log-in).
The network's own blurb maintains there is space for business networking on MySpace; technically there is no reason why not, but the garish colours and layouts militate against this more than slightly.
A major difference between MySpace and YouTube, however, is the scope for building and moderating discussion groups. If you doubt whether this is particularly important, bear in mind the success of the Arctic Monkeys, a rock group that shot to public fame through MySpace before they became major recording artists. It remains a powerful network and if your business promotes entertainment to young people, you should consider trying to harness it.
The demographics in independent studies suggest that the membership of MySpace is getting older and that the environment is therefore likely to start looking more mature as a result. It's difficult to see much evidence of this from the site itself, which still has exhortations to see the latest videos, listen to the latest music and chat about it all in the newest forums, splashed across its front pages.
This might sound like a criticism, which isn't my intention – in a business book this is going to make it less appropriate for many readers. Had I been writing a different sort of book this would be evidence of how MySpace is getting things spectacularly right.
There's a ready audience of young people who are ready and receptive for the 'next big thing'. Beware, though: clearly, for every Arctic Monkeys there's another 50 groups who've done less well.
The sign-up process is similar to most of the social networks except that MySpace offers special sign-ups for comedians and musicians, once again emphasizing the entertainment orientation of this network. Once you have signed up, the structure of the opening page tells you a lot about what to expect from MySpace.
Note
Instant messaging: E-mail-like system that allows you to send a message to anyone using the same messaging service, for example Windows Live! Instant Messenger.
As well as the standard 'here are your new friends' message, including the CEO of MySpace (he is a compulsory friend for new members of MySpace), there is a selection of videos and a highlighted personality before anyone has even filled in a profile.
There is also a clear encouragement to upload music and videos and an automatic start-up of an instant messaging client, as well the opportunity to start a blog.
For the diehard business user this is likely to be too much at once; for the target customer this everything-in-one-place might be perfect, although they're just as likely to want to upload a video to YouTube, put a blog on Blogger or WordPress and mix and match: they are becoming more sophisticated.
There is also a lively forum section. This offers businesses the chance to offer value to the audience; if an organization isn't certain it will attract enough people to its own Facebook page, a selection of forums like this one might make a viable alternative to join in order to establish some sort of thought leadership in a given area.
There are very few add-ons, although a mobile version of MySpace is available for download. The idea of MySpace is to get people online and using it as their home; the advertising that is sold on the strength of the time people spend online is how the site makes its money.
You need to be in tune with the MySpace culture to make your time worthwhile on this one; it's not going to change and it's not going to react well to a 'stuffed shirt'.
If your target customer isn't exactly right for the MySpace environment, don't try to send them there; they won't go.
Social networks are subject to fashion fluctuations; although MySpace still has millions of members, it doesn't have as many millions as it did a few years ago. It's certainly not on the critical list, but it could be worth Googling 'MySpace demographic' before committing to a marketing campaign on it in the future. For all anyone knows it could be the next in-thing again within months!
Picasa should by rights be a subsection within Blogger, because it's an application that sits on your computer – it's a free download – but you then get to upload your pictures to http://picasaweb.google.com. You can organize them, set security levels, put them into different albums and make them available or not to whomever you want. As you'll gather from the address, it's owned by Google and its appeal is as widespread.
Note
An application is a piece of software that does something, so Microsoft Word is an application, while Microsoft Windows is an operating system because it's an environment on which you put applications.
Quite simply, Picasa is a piece of software linked to a secure website that allows you to manage your photos online, either for your personal and business use or to share in public. As a Google product you can imagine it's fairly well linked to Blogger.
An even spread of men and women, predominantly over 50, but you don't need to know this: unusually in this section you're not being invited to join a community, just organize your own stuff and conceivably browse other people's pictures.
Any business that needs photography can benefit from Picasa and other services like Flickr (see the tips and tricks section). An estate agent can have photographs available when out of the office, using a mobile device; in fact, anyone using photography in their business would do well to have a look at this software.
At the risk of cutting a section short, sign in using a Google ID and start uploading by hitting the 'Upload photographs now' button. It's genuinely as easy as that.
If you'd rather use a website than an application for the same kind of function, have a look at
www.flickr.com, which allows for the upload, online management and sharing of pictures.Need a picture for a brochure or website? My journalist glands are saying 'stop putting photographers out of work, commission something!' but you might not have the budget. Check
http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/explore#and don't forget to look at the copyright disclaimers. Look also atFlickr.com; there might well be a photo someone has put up there specifically for people to share. Even if there's no copyright attached, please, please credit the photographer.
Plaxo was one of the earliest social networks, starting in the 1990s as an online contact directory so you'd never need to type them all into an address book again. The initial reaction was hostile; people didn't understand that someone would offer a service like this without harvesting the addresses and selling them on. True to its word, Plaxo did no such thing and has grown to expand its offering with the Plaxo Pulse, an update system that is close to (but not exactly the same as) a LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter update.
At base, Plaxo remains a neat way of keeping all of your contacts up to date; you enter their details or upload them from your Outlook file, and it mails the people periodically to ask if the information is still up to date.
It's also an update/message system that allows you to post brief messages about what you're doing at any given time. In addition to this, Plaxo has dabbled in 'fan pages' and groups, like a lot of the social networking providers, but the fan groups appear to be small (for example, the Star Trek fan page – Trekkies being very active in forums throughout the Internet – had 64 'shares' one month after the 2009 movie came out).
One of its main points of value, and Wikipedia backs this view up, is as an aggregator of content from other networks. The fan pages are powered by Fancast and many people with Plaxo accounts share their updates from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or wherever else they happen to be on the web.
Ignite Social Media reports that Plaxo has an even spread of male and female users, and more of them have a bachelor's degree than not. They are almost all over 35.
In spite of Plaxo's determination to market itself as a bona fide social network, the updating/sharing idea is so widely available on bigger networks it's almost not worth mentioning. Where Plaxo is brilliant is in its directory service: download whichever of the add-ons will work with your address book (there's one on the downloads tab for Outlook, one for Apple's address book and so on) and it keeps your address book up to date, periodically asking the people in it to update their own entries. In this it's unique, if they bother updating!
A very straightforward sign-up process is followed (ideally) by downloading the address book application. This uploads your contacts and asks those people whether they're still where you think they are, they amend accordingly and your address book is up to date.
By all means look at joining groups on Plaxo; this is an area that may grow, but the signs at the moment are that there is a limited audience using these. People wanting discussions are gravitating towards blogs, Facebook and other higher-profile networks.
The main value of the Plaxo network is in the applications available on the downloads page. There are also third-party applications that will link all of your updates – Plaxo Pulse, Twitter, Facebook – but beware of doing this too freely. As I've mentioned elsewhere, people have different expectations on different networks, and you might alienate your Facebook 'friends' by sending them all of your tweets and dominating their home page.
A number of colleagues might still find the idea of Plaxo having all of their details undesirable. The brand has proven to be trustworthy and protective of private data over time, but if someone wants you to take their details down, they're within their rights.
A related matter is that as a business, you may need to take advice on data protection legislation before sharing people's data with Plaxo or any other online database.
As I write, Twitter is the bees' knees, the head honcho, the granddaddy of them all (except it's one of the newest). Well, it is if you could column inches and percentage growth; in fact Facebook has a larger number of users and far richer content.
None of that matters to you; the situation can all change overnight. What you need to know is whether Twitter's going to be any use to you. The way you find this out is to do a quick audit of your customers and prospects before you even think about using it. Are they already on Twitter? Are they thinking of joining it? OK, then have a look at joining yourself.
Twitter at its most basic is a series of 140-character announcements to anyone who happens to be reading. These announcements are called 'tweets'. It's really as simple as that, and the simplicity is what makes it work.
Twitter didn't catch on immediately. Its founders put the service on a web page and let people make their announcements. From these I could gather that a lot of people had breakfast in the morning, and by lunchtime they were ready for lunch. In the evenings they would on average have whatever they called the evening meal, then later on they'd go to bed. This wasn't entirely thrilling.
Eventually, though, people started to put more interesting stuff up and the founders allowed a little more interaction. Crucially, they allowed people to reply to a tweet. This suddenly became a lot more involving. Consider the technology support person who puts up a tweet saying:
Note
Just finished sorting out someone's Mac problem, saved them buying a new computer.
Someone else sees this and knows they have a problem with their own Apple computer. Mac support being scarcer than PC support, they reply:
Note
@ITsupportperson Do you support Macs? Whereabouts are you based?
With a bit of luck the two will take this to private messages immediately so as not to bother everyone else with it. If they think their chat is going to be interesting, they'll leave it public.
The service itself is text only and free of charge. If you link to a video or audio, then some web browsers with add-ons will make your tweet look like it has the media embedded in it.
The audience for Twitter is growing and evolving all the time. A few celebrities famously hang out there and share their thoughts with the world. Some are extremely skilled at this: Philip Schofield looks like a nice guy sharing words and pictures with people, but he's also incredibly clever at extending his reach to his audience and building their loyalty to his programmes. This has no impact on his being a nice guy, I should add! Some are less so; one or two comedians putting up highly unfunny comments could do worse than to give it up.
The point is that these people attract a lot of ordinary onlookers whom it's difficult to categorise. Statistics show that there are a lot more of the 35–45 age group than many people would guess; data from Hitwise in March 2009 suggested that middle-aged men were the largest constituency, whereas data from marketing research company Compete the following month said that 18–24 year olds were still the biggest users. Anecdotally, it appears there are a lot of small business owner/managers and many public relations executives and journalists on Twitter, although this perception could be skewed by the number of PR people electing to 'follow' me as a journalist.
Twitter offers an unparalleled opportunity to react to customers sounding off in public; any announcements you might want to make have immediacy, and could well go straight to your customer's mobile phone no matter where they are; it is really simple to use.
Signing up to Twitter is really simple. Follow these steps:
Go to
http://twitter.com.Click the 'Sign up' tab.
Enter some details.
Start tweeting.
This gets you onto the very basic web view of Twitter, with which you're likely to become frustrated quite quickly; more on that in a moment. The next stage is to find some people to follow. Following is when you find people in whom you're interested, click on their profile and follow them. Their updates will start to appear on your Twitter web page (http://twitter.com/yourtwitternamegoeshere).
The next question is, of course, how to find relevant people, and this is a tricky one. It tends to grow organically: someone makes a comment after one of your tweets (your home page will have all of the @yourname comments as well as your own and those of the people you follow) and you find it interesting; you start following them. You hear from a friend that there's someone interesting you should follow, so you do so. There's a tradition called Followfriday in which people recommend other Twitter members to their followers because they like sharing fun or informative contacts. You feel obliged to follow Stephen Fry because it's like national service, you just think you ought to do it.
Your list of followers will soon start to grow, and they'll start recommending you to other people. There are third-party applications that will make your followers grow artificially, too, by locating people in your field and auto-adding them. We'll come on to them in a second.
What really makes Twitter fly is the stuff that you can add to it. At base, Twitter is a web-based series of announcements. This is only so much use to business customers, who'll want their tweets categorized and prioritized.
One way of doing this is a program called Tweetdeck, which you can use on a Mac or a PC. You can find it at www.tweetdeck.com and it's fast to download. It gives you a view of your standard inbox, but also a separate column for your direct messages and another for replies and mentions. A fourth column you can configure yourself, for searches, for groups, for hashtag subjects, for anything. It's a great way to organize all of your tweets coming in, which otherwise gets a bit like juggling flour.
There are a number of other Twitter applications that will do some of the same things. Twihrl (www.twihrl.com) is one; Twitterific is somewhat simpler and works just like an offline reader for your tweets (in other words, it presents them to you in a little on-screen box rather than insisting you go through the web).
There's other stuff you can do as well. Twitpic.com is a site that lets you enter your Twitter username and password, then upload pics and automatically tweet a link to them. If you're an estate agent and you're not salivating at the thought of alerting all of your clients to a new des res and having them click through to a photo of it really, really easily, then you're not thinking. Powertwitter is an add-on for your web browser that adds a powerful search facility to your Twitter homepage, translates all the links on people's Tweets into previews and other functions.
There are yet others, and by the time you've held this book in your hand for five minutes someone will have invented even more. Twittergrader will tell you, if you enter your Twitter name, how important it thinks you are (I'm two thousandth out of 2 million, it says here, and my Twitter grading is 99.8 percent. You will have noticed this is completely meaningless ego-driven guff, I trust). Twilerts (www.twilert.com) allow you to enter a search, save it and have the updated results delivered to you periodically; so if you want to keep an eye on what people are saying about your company every week, set up a weekly twilert for yourcompanyname and you'll get a note telling you about it. The latest version of Tweetdeck will also save searches for you.
There will be more on applications with which you can use Twitter later in the book under mobile social networking. Meanwhile, we're going to have to move on or we'll be here all day.
Remember, this is social media, so try to engage a little rather than simply putting ads up for your company; people will soon unfollow you if they think that's all they're going to get.
If you're getting into an exchange of views with someone, consider taking it to private messages so it doesn't clutter up everybody else's in-box.
Don't get all insecure about how many followers you have or constantly tweet about it: you'll look like a 12 year old. Or Ashton Kutcher.
Do link to your blog from time to time, but only if it's relevant, and don't just post links.
Do share stuff you find interesting.
Don't link every tweet to an identical entry on Facebook; that's so last year.
Try to be even shorter than 140 characters in every tweet. If I write something and someone wants to retweet it, they have to do so, with 'rt @guyclapperton' in front; that's 16 characters gone, 17 with a space afterwards. So if I'm hoping to be retweeted I try to limit my tweet to 123 characters.
Expect to miss tweets and don't worry about it. It's going to happen. People will miss your tweets as well. It's that sort of medium.
OK, this one's cheating a bit; Wikipedia isn't a social network as such, but it certainly uses social networking techniques to keep itself up to date.
Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia. What is unique about it is that it is managed by its community: you can amend entries yourself by becoming a registered user. This can be useful when you have specialist knowledge the established writers lack: for example, a colleague of mine who was a science fiction writer died a couple of years ago and I was able to amend his Wikipedia entry to reflect that he was also a popular and respected technology journalist. The facility to change entries can also be abused and it can take time for the volunteer editors to amend inaccuracies. This is why, briefly, while he was Prime Minister, Tony Blair's middle name was listed in Wikipedia as Whoop-de-do. No, it wasn't me. But if I'd thought of it first...
There's no obvious business application for Wikipedia itself, but it's possible to use the same model to build up your company's internal knowledge base, putting some sort of social networking capability into your own business. For example some engineering firms have an internal Wiki to which their employees add information based on experience as they acquire it.
Google-owned YouTube is an interesting example of a medium that has transformed during the writing of this book. The principle is really easy: you upload videos to share with other people and that's about it.
It used to be seen primarily as a young person's medium. Then in December 2008 the Queen put her Christmas message on YouTube. In early 2009 Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an announcement about MPs' pay on YouTube; you might remember the pictures of that interesting smile, if I can put it like that. A lot of people were using the site to listen to music and watch videos, but in late 2008 a falling-out between YouTube owner Google and the rights holders meant these were all taken off, at least temporarily. These videos were reinstated as this book went to press.
Where does YouTube go next? I don't know.
YouTube started life as, and remains, a video service. To use the site you'll need to have your video ready, preferably in MP4 format (most hard disk-based video cameras will record in this format by default). Uploading high-definition videos is fine.
Note
URL: Universal Resource Locator, more often called a web address these days.
Your use can be a little more flexible than simply putting a video up and asking everyone to go to YouTube to look at it, though. You can upload a video and then, while you're playing it back online to check it looks OK, look to the right of the picture and you'll see a box with two pieces of code. One of these is the URL. You can put this as a link on your website and send people to the video using it. Better still, there's an 'embed' code. Cut and paste this onto your website, making absolutely sure you paste it as plain text, and – wait for it – the video appears on your own website or blog as if you'd put it there yourself and you don't have to pay for storing the video. Doing so is free, and a video on your site will look very professional (temporarily, once everybody realizes how easy it is they'll all be doing it).
Once you've made a video – maybe a training video, maybe a piece of viral marketing, maybe a corporate presentation – set up a YouTube channel. These are free. Simply go to YouTube.com, press the 'Sign up' button, follow the instructions and enter your details. Then select a video from those on your computer to upload and start either embedding or directing people to individual videos or your YouTube channel.
Note
Viral marketing: a piece of marketing collateral, often a video, that spreads by personal recommendation.
Inevitably, the part that will need the most work and thought is going to be making the video in the first place. Modern versions of Windows and Apple computers have excellent, easy video-editing tools on them and some copyright-free background music. Try to remember that looking flash isn't necessarily a good thing; if you use a different transition between every scene your video's going to look tacky, and if you're of the persuasion that you should use as many fonts and colours as your computer will allow then it's time you got over it.
None – the trick with YouTube is that you can add videos from it to your own website. On the right of the screen when you're watching a video you may notice there is an area with some code – one of these codes allows you to link to the video, the other allows you to 'embed'. Put this code into your web page as plain text and the video will appear on it as if it were on your actual site.
Simple is good – people might be watching on their mobile devices so no matter how good your movie is they won't see fine detail
Short is good – people don't expect to watch a video at their desk for as long as they would on a TV screen
Passworded is easy, so if you want to show a video to your colleagues without using up your own storage space by all means pop it onto YouTube
High definition camcorders are nowhere near as expensive as you think!