Archive for the ‘Social networking’ Category

How to type your tweets on Twitter

The buzz about Twitter is a triumph online. But what is the function of the application? Is it useful? Irritating? A waste of time or an innovative touchstone in social networking?
Well, it depends…

Twitter is a tool. Twitter is neutral. It’s our job, as Twits and Twittettes, to give the tool purpose. We can use our tweets for everything from online Twirting (tweet flirting) to tweeting twips (tweet tips) about job opportunities or new studies. There seem to be four unofficial categories of Twits so far:

The Professional Twit (ProTwit)
The Professional Twit uses Twitter to make connections out of contacts. No longer is it enough to send the random email reminding your contacts that you work in the same field. If you are a ProTwit, you are proactive. You are in constant communication with a network. You share studies, data and info in real time on a rolling basis. You think that Twitter’s great for creating a network of connections that you can trust. Your fellow Twits are tried and true and quick to twitter back.

The Social Twit (SocialTwite)
If you’re a bit of a globetrotter, then you may be a SocialTwite. You tweet about your daily activities, sharing your life with a network that may span continents in the offline world. As a SocialTwite, you are interested in the lives as well as the occupations of your fellow Twits. You share gossip, twitter about your frustrations and your fun, and sometimes even twirt.

The SoliciTwit

The SoliciTwit strikes temptation into the hardware of tantalised Twits everywhere. The SoliciTwit is often a marketer or a SalesTwit, but, as a SoliciTwit, you can also work in Human Resources. You tweet about limited time opportunities, special offers, and new releases. Followers of SoliciTwits want to take advantage of special opportunities before any non-Twits find out them about  through simple search or email. SoliciTwits can also tweet about possible jobs or investment opportunities. Most of us Twits include at least one SoliciTwit in our flock of followees.

The Total Twit

As a Total Twit, you combine all the Twit types in your online flocks. A Total Twit is not limited to Twitter, we hope—instead, as a Total Twit, you may find your Tweets are unlimited in type and interest. You mix business with pleasure and tweet about it all to your online flocks. Attentio tends to be a bit of a Total Twit, as does the Attentio team of Twits.

European Social Networks top Google Global Searches

Out of the top global Google searches for 2008, four search terms are social networking sites. Three of these social networking sites are exclusively European. Two of these three are “invitation only” social networking sites.

• Topping the list at no. 3 is Facebook login
• No. 4 is Tuenti, a Madrid-based “invitation only” social networking site,
• no. 7 is Nasza Klasa, a Polish “find old classmates” site initially frequented by older Polish persons, but attracting more and more youthful members
• no. 8 is Wer Kennt Wen, a German “invitation only” social networking site that looks for “who knows who?”

Seems social networking has blossomed just as we have.

Our international team is pleased to see that we cover all the necessary languages-with native speakers. Time to set up a nice project to track what the forum and blog buzz is about these networks. We should probably do some back-in-time tracking. Do you think that three months back in time is enough?

Health Care Consumers and online conversation create communities

An Economist article explored the trend of medical tourism in Europe and the United States. Consumers of medical services are going abroad to escape high prices and long lines at home. Hannaford, a grocery chain, and a few intrepid insurance programmes, are exploring the possibility of lowering total employee heathcare costs through incentivising traveling abroad for health care needs.

Physical travel, however, is the tip of a rapidly decentralising (disintegrating?) health care consumer paradigm. HCPs (Health care consumers) also go online rather than travel abroad to find products and services that they couldn’t otherwise access. In doing so, they frequently discover new and innovative products and services that pique consumer interest and fuel further individual (as well as corporate) research.

HCPs find communities of like-minded patients and caregivers and exchange information, ideas and opinions about health care goods, services, even specific providers. They research medications and treatments through forums and health care social networking sites like Trusera and PatientsLikeMe.

HCPs that share languages compare and critique public health systems. They let each other know what’s available where and who or which insurance is willing to fund what. Even institutionally-based medications, once limited to the institution that provided them, can now limit the institution. If a patient can’t access the med that s/he thinks s/he needs locally, s/he goes online and finds a provider that is willing to access the HCP–through the mail, through a network, through travel.

Health used to be geographic. What the next-door neighbor perceived as “health” could be considered standard for the neighbourhood. Now, the community of patients or HCPs determines what is “health” for their community. A patient suffering from dysthymia, a mood disorder, can go online and ask fellow patients across the globe how they best deal with depression. Then that community can advise, support, sympathise and even supply a patient with the products and services that patient wants.

How the West was won: Is search settling down?

Paul Dunay, the Director of the Global Field Marketing for BearingPoint in the United States, interviews Adam Lavelle, Chief Strategy Officer of iCrossing here. They discuss the pre-Search and post-Search society and its current transition. Lavelle and Dunay call traditional search engines “reputation management systems”. Lavelle predicts that methods of search for the average consumer are evolving from open-ended exploration to a more established collaborative sharing.

An online Search used to be the map that a searcher wrote herself. The virtual world was wide and uncharted. A self-motivated Searcher chose her terms and clickedthrough to her consequences. Then adwords rewrote the rules, subtly shifting the unchartered territory in favour of those communities with the best technology and technical know-how.

But Search is no longer a lone spot of civilization on the online map. While we haven’t stopped expanding the virtual world, we’ve civilized the territory, erecting our online databases, networks, and communities. We’ve established highways and byways that constrain but also simplify life for the online traveler.

But signposts have been (and are ever being) erected along the highways and byways of the information superhighways.

These signposts are erected by social media. These signposts are the brands, products, services, and ideas that the original searchers carried with them from the real world to the virtual. These signposts now dot the online landscape. Communities cluster around them, discussing, buzzing and bickering about the brands that delight and bug the people back home.

This is what Lavelle refers to when he stresses the changes wrought by social media in the realm of search. Now communities want networks of shared experience to validate the expertise offered by the trailblazing technology of Search. Social media offers this combination of expertise validated by shared experience, making these conversations, this buzz, both authoritative and influential.

Tracking these communities is essential for any successful brand. Its new territory out there and you need to know where your brand stands (or rather, where it’s been stood).

How to measure your market and make more than a momentary mint

There are two central concerns in online marketing: creating attractive content and distributing that content effectively.  Both factors are dependent upon the industry, product or service and the relevant online market.

Rather, both factors require an accurate Q2 (quantified and qualified) assessment of said market. To address both factors, one needs a Q2 evaluation of the social media surrounding the target market.

Content is three dimensional. It should be visual, viral, and current.

Good content is visually appealing to one’s clients or consumers. The content must be viral in that the information is info that the consumers wish to share–it must infect the individual’s network and not just the individual. Current content is essential. Studies emphasise that WOM (word of mouth) in the chaotic market that is online social media has a “sensitive dependence on initial conditions“. That is, change one letter in the address bar and one’s entire audience is new.  Current content combines the past and the present.  Current content knows the real time concerns and considerations as well as the history of the immediate trends. Current content connects the initial “sensitive dependencies” to the modern market. It is that connection and timely awareness, cleverly and creatively communicated, that makes worthy content viral.  And zing, you’ve just infected a network of interested individuals, aka customers, clients, your market.

But wait.

Content requires effective distribution. Despite the chaos of the online market, or perhaps due to this chaos, esoteric communities and networks specialising in equally valid content remain entirely sealed off from one another. In quantum physics, this phenomenom of multiple realities is called the multiverse. In business, it’s called redundant.

Successful distribution online is also three dimensional.  Successful distribution needs to be authoritative, influential, and proactive. The distributor should have intimate knowledge of her market.  Her authority should be obvious in her engagement with the online community. Distribution needs to be influential. The method of distribution must be broad, connecting several different networks and always searching for additional networks to add to the growing spiderweb of interconnectivity.  This is why all distribution must be proactive, soliciting potential clients to access the content that will influence and create new markets.

Pitch my market

I’ve been doing some demos with the software recently, and I’ve come up with a general pitch that seems to appeal to our clients. I want to post it here, hoping for feedback on my powers of communication.

Attentio is a personalised (or rather, industrialised and/or corporate) media manager. Acting as a filing system of all online content, Attentio organises and stores information as it is created in the Internet. It’s one stop-shopping for all the information that you need, organised by source, subject, language, country, etc.

For example, Attentio’s tools note that MySpace is outstripping Facebook in overall popularity in forums and blogs, but Facebook users are more well-rounded than MySpace users. People that talk about Facebook also talk about books, movies, and Facebook’s notorious privacy policy. MySpace posters tend to be less finicky about their privacy policies and more excited about music and cds.

LinkedIn professionals, who prioritise privacy, are increasingly visible in the Spanish and French language blogosphere. LinkedIn’s Facebook tool is also picking up in popularity as the first Facebook generation graduates from socialising to networking. All this Attentio presents in lovely graphs that allow you to clickthrough to access the content that’s been filed for you.

There’s a joke that says the difference between business and economics is that business treats money as finite. The more money one person has, the less others are able to obtain. Economists know money is man-made, just like markets.

Man-made markets are why social networks are online media superstars these days. MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like have bottled up beaucoups de potential markets. Individuals involved in the networks connect over common interests. These wants and desires are all bottled up online, waiting for some entrepreneurial genie to grant the multitude its mass of group wishes.

The information in these networks is posted for free. The trick, as in any business, is managing the information. Monitoring and measuring the trends and receiving up to date details about what the people in the networks are discussing and why. Market researchers can waste hours every day searching for every article that mentions their markets or potential markets. Or they can use Attentio software.

Where there is consumer will, there is a consumer market. And the success of any market lies in identifying the consumers, letting them know that they constitute a market, and organising their demands to meet your supply. Or is it the other way round?

Either way, this is stuff any economist or business person needs to know.