"Social Web Strategies" - 5 new articles
Evolution of the social webAt Social Web Strategies, we’ve been saying that the future of the social web includes data portability. An April Forrester report drew the same conclusion.
Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience. Brian Solis at Social Media Today writes about Forrester’s report, saying that social networks are evolving into a social operating system, and that “social networks and sites will recognize the preferences of users, but more significantly, they will also recognize personal identities and relationships to customize the experience based on preference and behavior….I believe that the combination of semantic and collective intelligence systems will improve the content and overall interaction within sites and social networks over time.” None of this is really news, maybe clarification. I was in conversations with Tim O’Reilly and others in the early 2000s that acknowledged that the Internet/Web was an operating system and inherently social. Those conversations led to the paper Tim and Dale Daugherty wrote that loosely defined concepts labeled “Web 2.0.” The Data Portability Project kicked off in 2007, and we’ve been trying to get our heads around individual data management since the 1990s (thinking of P3P). Thinking about the semantic web has been brewing since the turn of the century. Various data interchange formats and semantic web projects have emerged since then. What’s interesting in Solis’ piece is the concept of SRM – Social Relationship Management – vs Customer Relationship Management and Doc Searls’ idea of Vendor Relationship Management. CRM and VRM combined make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. We get to a point where customers and vendors are transparent to each other, and are part of a larger social ecosystem that can facilitate authentic and symmetrical relationships. Solis says
The biggest opportunity for the expansion of social networks is to build bridges between these isolated islands to deliver a more fulfilling, meaningful and productive experience. As I see it, we will start to see a the social web not as a collection of distributed islands, but as one greater collective better known as a human network – a contextual and relationship-based network that consists of like-minded individuals no matter where their profile resides. Open Source Whitehouse.govThe Obama Administration is moving Whitehouse.gov to the Open Source Drupal platform, based on a set of requirements for a platform “where dynamic features like question-and-answer forums, live video streaming, and collaborative tools could work more fluidly together with the site’s infrastructure.” The Personal Democracy Forum explores the social relevance of the decision to adopt Drupal, which is known for its interactive community features:
Let’s really try to extract the last drop of possible meaning from a choice over a CMS. Squint a bit, and it’s possible to see the White House’s move to open-source software as a move towards the idea that collaborative programming can inspire — or at least, support — a more distributed politics. That idea bubbled up in 2004, when young programmers experimented with using Drupal itself to turn the Howard Dean campaign into the Howard Dean network. [Jon Lebkowsky of Social Web Strategies was part of that effort.] This idea, that a politics crafted by the people could be a powerful thing indeed, emerged in a slightly mutated way during the Obama presidential campaign, but has arguably receded below the surface during the first nine months of the Obama Administration. First the WhiteHouse.gov CMS gets more open, then the White House OS? Perhaps. Shirky Hack DayClay Shirky: “If a community thinks it’s a success, it’s a success.” YouTuberated for Open Hack Day. (Yahoo!) Make something greatDerek Powazek says don’t pay for search engine optimization. Rather…
Read the complete post by Derek Powazek. Derek argues that most of what you need to know about SEO can be described in a paragraph or so, and I’ve said so myself. However we wouldn’t steer business clients away from SEO, as long as they understand that it’s not magic, and that it’s part of a larger strategy where the emphasis is on great content, as Derek says. For many clients, an SEO consultation or relationship with a clueful, ethical search company – Apogee Search, for example – is a path toward transformation of a good site to a great site. This is because the best SEO consultants will tell you that you have to do the things Derek mentions, and they’ll work with you on content as well as keyword development. They’ll tell you that SEO isn’t voodoo. Much of what they will do is help you determine keywords and site adjustments that are most likely to increase exposure and produce conversions. We do something broader – help you develop a strategy and roadmap for creating a compelling presence across relevant social platforms – but we start with your web site, which is the core of your web presence. Increasingly people will find you through your social media presence, as well as search, so you have to consider both part of your strategy for building a successful online presence. We address SEO as part of our complete strategic web service, but we focus more on helping you create a compelling presence – making something great. Join the conversation about social businessThose of you who are following Social Web Strategies, especially those that have met with us, have heard us say for the last two years that business is moving to the web. We’ve discussed how the internal uses and implications of social media will have more impact and be more interesting than the marketing applications that have been evolving (with some difficulty and controversy, I should add). Since Dave Evans joined our company almost a year ago, we’ve had many conversations about how the social web is more than a marketing channel or awareness platform. We’ve also discussed how social technology can disintermediate the space between operations and the customer (which was mediated by marketing and PR, lacking scalable tools for more direct communication). There’s also the idea of marketing within the company, and facilitating a mashup of marketing and operations, an alignment that requires robust communication between the two usually siloed parts of the business. What we’ve been talking about is social business, and others are starting to pick up the conversation. The Dachis Group here in Austin has been talking about these points, prompting the Neville Hobson post “Is ’social business’ the new black,” and a response from Dave in his ClickZ column. I posted a link to Dave’s column in our LinkedIn Group and on our Facebook page. We invite you to comment either place, and join the conversation. More Recent Articles |
