More Mobile Social Proof Points

On February 18, 2010, In New, By Tac Anderson
My Cyber Social Map
Image by frankdasilva via Flickr

Following yesterday’s post “Social Media and Mobile Growth are Exponentially Symbiotic” I wanted to post 2 quick links that emphasize the relationship between mobile and social.

Rohit has a good post detailing a milestone of sorts in mobile’s maturity.

Influential Marketing Blog: 5 Terms That Signify The Future Of Mobile Marketing

It’s hard to predict, but I can say that this year does represent a unique moment where all the different aspects of mobile marketing that have long been preached by believers as signifying a cultural shift that matters to marketers are coming together.

The Shortcode
LBS (Location Based Services)
APP(lications)
AR (Augmented Reality)
DMPs (Direct MobilePayments)

ReadWriteWeb reports on a recent study showing that mobile social networking is now more popular than desktop social networking.

Social Networking Now More Popular on Mobile than Desktop

During the 2.7 hours per day that people in the U.S. spending on the mobile web, 45% are posting comments on social networking sites, 43% are connecting with friends on social networking sites, 40% are sharing content with others and 38% are sharing photos. While those last two figures represent activities that can take place outside of a dedicated social networking service, like a Facebook app for example, they still are inherently social activities.

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Is FriendFeed getting the respect it deserves?

On April 2, 2009, In New, By Tac Anderson
Image representing FriendFeed as depicted in C...

Image via CrunchBase

If you read this blog even somewhat frequently then you know I’m a little odd. I proudly admit it. I experiment with new Web apps and new ways of doing things that don’t make sense to most people. One thing that I’ve been doing lately (and blogged about) is mashing up Google Alerts, Zemanta for Gmail and Posterous.

Why do I do this? Two reasons really:

  1. It gives me an interesting way to consume my various Google Alerts
  2. For me it’s the blogging equivalent of “warming up”

3 alerts I have set up are for Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook. To me these are the three most interesting social networking services out there (right now at least, that could always change tomorrow).

FriendFeed Get’s No Love

From the very beginning I’ve noticed a trend Twitter and Facebook get all the attention while FriendFeed is relegated to the fringe.

If you look at this post FriendFeed gets 1 news result and 5 blog posts. Total 6

A Facebook post from the same day gets 9 news results and 5 blog posts. Total 14

Finally a recent Twitter post gets 6 news results and 5 blog posts. Total 11

These results are pretty consistent. Some days Twitter gets more results than Facebook but they both consistently crush FriendFeed results. And to add insult to injury only two FriendFeed results don’t mention Twitter or Facebook. Meaning that FriendFeed is usually only mentioned when someone is doing a round up of new social media tools. It rarely gets it’s own coverage.

Now Google Alerts aren’t perfect but they are a good indicator.

Is FriendFeed Only For Geeks?

I recently asked the question on FriendFeed if the service was getting the love they deserved. Brando gave me this response:

I don’t know if it is respect as much as it is a matter of timing (it’s Twitter’s time for now) and social media fatigue. After a while, people are going to get sick of logging into platforms like this unless it’s really easy to manage, such as with Facebook Connect). I love Friendfeed though, so give it time and you might just see it emerge as a popular platform. – Brandon J. Mendelson

Facebook has been mainstream for a while now. Twitter is just now going mainstream. Will FriendFeed also find it’s way past early adopters? That remains to be seen.

FriendFeed has two components to it: Capabilities and Community

Capabilities

FriendFeed arguably has superior technology behind it compared to Facebook and Twitter. It was built by ex-Googlers (the guys that built Gmail). The amazing search capabilities within FriendFeed makes setting up an account and dumping in all of your online data, well worth it.

The true power of FriendFeed’s capabilities only comes into play when you tweak the default settings and fine tune your preferences. This is a barrier to new users but really I don’t know that this is any more challenging than the set up time that comes from all social media tools. It’s just a matter of the main stream finding enough value to spend the time to do it.

Community

This is the real barrier to entry in FriendFeed. Like most social networks the real real value comes from the community. If you’re not part of the early adopter crowd you may not have anyone to immediately follow on FriendFeed. They do have recommended followers but these are primarily made up of the uber early adopters.

The community at large on FriendFeed (like all social networks) rewards participation. Getting articles liked or commented on can be difficult if you don’t spend much time on their. I’ve noticed a direct relationship between the amount of articles you “like” and the likelihood that your posts will get “liked”.

Since FriendFeed is made up of primarily uber early adopters this means “liking” hundreds of posts a week. If you’re only liking single or double digit number of posts you are much less likely to get noticed.

This is not to say that people on FriendFeed are exclusionary. This is just basic social theory. The more active you are in a community and the more value you add the more likely you are to be accepted and rewarded.

Will FriendFeed succeed? I think so. It offers a great feature set with some great functionality. But like all social networks, the rabid early adopter fans will need to make way for the main stream users.

[UPDATE] There is an additional conversation happening on FriendFeed here.

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New Channels of Engagement

On April 17, 2007, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

I find myself debating with people about the business relevance of New Media tools. For the last two years (and probably for the next two years) I have dealt with sceptics who question the validity of blogs, podcasts, wiki’s, forums and online social networks (LinkedIn) as a viable communication medium.

Lately I have been fielding the same questions about communities like Twitter, Ning and Second Life. In my last post I wrote about the problems with e-mail: The channel is clogged.

The same problem exists with radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, junk mail, spam, and telephone marketers. The channels are clogged. When users no longer find a particular channel useful will they use less channels? No, they will find or make new channels.

This is what Twitter, Second Life, MySpace, blogs, etc, are: new channels of communication. Ironically, this is what TV, radio and the printed press started off as: channels of communication. Then people started asking what the business application was. Now these channels are so clogged with ‘business applications’ (ie marketing) that we have to find new channels of communication in order to talk to each other.

In a previous post I talked about what New Media could learn from the “demise” of old media. My recommendation to Marketers: Tread lightly, don’t yell, don’t interrupt, engage, add value, participate.

The same is happening in our workplace. We don’t have enough channels for the amount of information we have (and we haven’t seen anything yet). All of our old channels were designed in a different world; a world of limited information. This is why I blogged about the death of e-mail. As we have created more information we have crammed it in the same channels: e-mail, TV, radio, etc.

New Media is a channel, how we use it is what makes it powerful or just another annoyance.

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Follow-Up on WGI’s Internal Blogging

On March 26, 2007, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

It was almost one year ago that Shel Israel met with Andy Snodgrass to talk about internal blogging at WGI.

I had the opportunity to meet Andy and I had to ask him if anything had become of his interest in internal blogging. I was disappointed but not at all surprised to hear that nothing at all had come of it. It seemed apparent from his response that the idea was not even on the table anymore.

WGI like most companies in America are faced with an uncertain future. There is going to be a huge loss in resources and knowledge as Baby Boomers leave the workplace. There just are not as many Gen Xers (about half) to fill the vacancy’s that are coming and Gen Y is mostly too green to take on higher management role.

Andy admitted that social networking tools would be a perfect fit to solve their problems. He also brought up one of the best arguments as to why they dropped the idea: Baby Boomers won’t use the tools. Now my first gut reaction was: there are Baby Boomers who blog, followed by, if you implemented the tools, provided training and instituted a policy…. Then reality set in, yeah they wouldn’t use it. Most Baby Boomers are not going to use any type of social networking tool.

WGI has a good plan in place: As their engineers move into retirement, hire them back part time and team them up with someone they can mentor. A good majority of these Type A engineers would love an opportunity like this.

Then I thought a little more seriously about their problem. How do they pass on all of that valuable information from their aging engineers to the younger, just out of school engineers? One on one is great and invaluable, but how much information can be passed on and retained this way. WGI’s plan won’t work for each new hire. Even if they could get a one to one match up across the company you have personality differences and generational dynamics that won’t work in all cases. Plus how long will Baby Boomers really want to work or be able to?

Gen Y and a certain percentage of Gen X would willingly use new media tools. Combine those tools with the steps that WGI is already implementing and you have a real Enterprise 2.0 Knowledge Management solution. As the younger engineers learn from their mentors they can record and share that information with their peers. Blogs, podcasts, wikis, tagging, RSS feeds and all things geeky could make information sharing across the entire company infinitely more powerful than any currently available enterprise solution.

Obviously no solution is utopian, and there would still be many more hurdles to implementing a solution like this but it seems better than anything else I’ve heard of. Does anyone know of a company using new media for this type of solution? Can someone think of a better solution?

Additional Resources:
All Kind Food
Andrew McAfee

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