The greatest value of online communities is increasing word of mouth (35 percent), increasing brand awareness (28 percent), bringing new ideas into the organization faster (24 percent) and increasing customer loyalty (24 percent), according to a survey of organizations using online communities conducted by Beeline Labs, Deloitte and the Society for New Communications Research. The 2008 Tribalization of Business study found that the greatest obstacles to making a community work are not technology-related or getting funding, but getting people involved in the community (51 percent), finding enough time to manage the community (45 percent) and attracting people to the community (34 percent).
Dion Hinchcliffe writes: “Creating online communities of customers and workers has been one of the hotter topics in business and technology this year. Whether you’re on the business side, in IT, or are just trying to build virtual teams around shared goals, online communities are rapidly becoming a popular way to organize people and accomplish work in a highly collaborative manner. These communities aren’t just for socializing but for getting things done.”
Marshall Kirkpatrick writes: “Are you the only person at work who likes to read blogs? Is it your job to talk to people who would probably throw you out of their offices if you said the word ‘Twitter?’ Are you trying to reach audiences who’ve never visited a social networking website because they’ve heard those sites are used by no one but virus peddlers, sex fiends, and 14-year-old losers? Here are five strategies for using social media to reach people who don’t use social media, with specific tools you can use to do it.
Wired takes a look at a handful of fascinating “-pedias,” including Lostpedia (beware of spoilers!), Uncyclopedia, Chickipedia (borderline NSFW), Dickipedia (mostly SFW, believe it or not), Wookieepedia, Dealipedia, Congresspedia, and Pedialyte. If not for Wookieepedia, how would you know that the Codex of Karness Muur was translated into Basic by Naga Sadow.
Epitaph or cruel reminder? Your Facebook fixture poses interesting questions after your death, writes Nomfundo Xulu. Lately I have been pondering what I would like done to my very active Facebook profile if, God forbid, I were to die today. A part of me wants it to remain online until the powers that govern the site see that I have not logged on in a while and maybe get rid of it. Another part of me wants it to disappear as quickly as possible so that my friends and family don’t have to deal with the very blatant memories of me. Yet a very big part of me wants it to remain for as long as Facebook is in operation. And sometimes I don’t care what happens to the profile on which I have documented a series of events for the past two years of my life.
Despite the rise of social networking websites and e-mail more people prefer communicating face to face now than ten years ago. BT has carried out a new study with Ipsos MORI into people’s usage of and attitudes towards technology. Three quarters of us now use the internet to keep in touch compared to 44% ten years ago, and the number of people who favor e-mail as a way of communicating has risen by 6%. More than 2,000 people were interviewed as part of the study, which revealed the popularity of using the phone has halved. Just over two-thirds of those polled preferred speaking face-to-face rather than using any technology to stay in touch, compared to 51% ten years ago.
US Internet users ages 10 to 15 flocked to social networks last year as if getting a MySpace account would increase their allowances. Harris Interactive said in its April 2008 issue of Youth Trends that more than half of US girls ages 13 to 15 used social networking Web sites in 2007, roughly the same as in 2006. Social networking jumped among other boys and girls surveyed: more than twice as many children ages 10 to 12 reported using social networking sites in 2007 as did in 2006.
According to a February 2008 Orange study, 21% of UK parents have created a social networking profile for their newborn bundle of joy within minutes of delivery. Babies are also apparently expected to strike a pose. One out of five responding UK parents said they snapped and sent photos of infants to family and friends within the first 10 minutes of life. Nearly half did so within an hour.
The idea of a social graph–a representation of a person’s network of friends, family, and acquaintances–gained currency last year as the popularity of online social networks grew: Facebook, for example, claims to have more than 64 million active users, with 250,000 more signing up each day. It and other sites have tried to commercialize these social connections by allowing outside developers to build applications that access users’ networks. Facebook also advertises to a user’s contacts in accordance with the user’s online buying habits. The push to understand the nature and potential value of links between people online has led to imaginative ways to represent such networks. Here, we look at some of them.
Online social networks have allowed people to easily stay in touch with large groups of friends, but the flip side has been well publicized. Some users have struggled over what to do when certain people–such as a boss or an ex-boyfriend–ask to be listed as a friend on their profile. Adding someone as a friend gives him access to the user’s profile, photos, and daily musings. Worries about privacy were renewed recently when Facebook’s Beacon advertising initiative began broadcasting information about users’ purchasing habits throughout its networks. (See “Evolving Privacy Concerns.”) Now Moli, a recently launched social-networking site, aims to win over concerned users. President and COO Judy Balint says that the site is intended for a more mature audience than the teenagers targeted by many social-networking websites. Directed at users who are trying to balance personal and professional networks, Moli offers multiple profiles–with different privacy settings–within one account.
The past three months have seen an explosion in the use of social networking sites by Australians as more women join them, a new report from Nielsen Online has found. But contrary to fearmongering by employers concerned with the sites’ impact on worker productivity, most Australians log on to such sites for only one to four hours a week. Almost one-third of Australians with a social networking profile began using the sites within the past three months, the report, based on a survey of 4000 people and data from Nielsen’s online behavioral measurement service, found.
People are flocking to online social networks. Facebook, for example, claims an average of 250,000 new registrations per day. But companies are still hunting for ways to make these networks more useful–and profitable. In the past year, Facebook has introduced new services aimed at taking advantage of users’ online contacts (see “Building onto Facebook’s Platform”), and Yahoo announced plans for an e-mail service that shares data with social-networking sites. (See “Yahoo’s Plan for a Smarter In-Box.”) Now a company called Delver, which presented at Demo recently, is working on a search engine that uses social-network data to return personalized results from the larger Web.
The growing popularity of online communities is increasing the awareness of—and participation in—social causes, according to the “2008 Digital Future Project,” conducted by the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. The survey found that 15% of US Internet users are members of an online community, defined as “a group that shares thoughts or ideas or works on common projects through electronic communication only.” But within that group, 94% said the Internet helped inform them about social causes.
TechCrunch reports that Yahoo! is experimenting with integrating del.icio.us bookmark data into regular search results. After the regular search listing Yahoo! will add a line saying something like “X people bookmarked this page under [these categories]”.Yahoo! bought this very popular online bookmark service in 2005.
Lee LeFever of Common Craft has created a short video (2:50) that demonstrates the usefulness of saving and sharing your digital photos online: “Thankfully, online photo sharing services make it easy to back up your photos and share them with the world. If you want to encourage your friends or family to start sharing photos online, point them here.”
Facebook has 59 million users - and 2 million new ones join each week. But you won’t catch Tom Hodgkinson volunteering his personal information - not now that he knows the politics of the people behind the social networking site. “…I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you”. But hang on. Why on God’s earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?…”
MySpace as well as Attorneys General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Roy Cooper of North Carolina announced an intention t o alleviate concerns about the safety of social networking sites by outlining a set of new rules that have been put in place to especially protect teenagers online. Representing a Working Group on Social Networking covering 49 States and the District of Columbia, MySpace and Attorneys General Blumenthal and Cooper unveiled a Joint Statement on Key Principles of Social Networking Sites Safety. Presented as a rulebook for “industry-wide adoption”, the principles are split into four different categories. First, the functionality of sites should be extended so that every image and video uploaded to the site, as well as group content is reviewed, profiles of 14 and 15 year old users are made private automatically, and profiles of registered sex offenders are deleted. MySpace also said that it is defaulting 16 and 17 year old users’ profiles to private and it will enforce the site’s minimum age of 14.
Marshall Kirkpatrick writes: “I decided to make a list of the Top 10 Objections to New Online Tools and What You Can Say in Response. I surveyed my nearly 1,300 friends on Twitter and got all kinds of thoughtful replies. But ultimately, I’m not yet convinced myself that persuading anyone is the way to go. If you can make time on the side to use new tools and you can perform—perhaps the benefits can best speak for themselves.”
Nielsen released their top 10 social networks in the U.S. There is one notable company missing from the list: Bebo, usually referred to as the “number three social network” and “really big in the UK,” Bebo apparently didn’t register the 3.3 million unique visitors in the US necessary to beat out Flixster for 10th place on Nielsen’s list.
Mention online social networks and the two that readily come to most people’s minds are LinkedIn and Facebook. Why do people prefer Facebook to LinkedIn and vice versa? The NextStage CRO explains.
There are more than 50 million adults with disabilities in the United States alone. They now have access to a targeted social network: Disaboom. Disaboom was founded by J. Glen House, who graduated from medical school after a skiing accident left him quadriplegic at the age of 20. Its mission is to develop the first interactive online community dedicated to improving the lives of people with disabilities or functional limitations.
Five Weeks to a Social Library is the first free, grassroots, completely online course devoted to teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries. It was developed to provide a free, comprehensive, and social online learning opportunity for librarians who do not otherwise have access to conferences or continuing education and who would benefit greatly from learning about social software. The course will be taught using a variety of social software tools so that the participants acquire experience using the tools while they are taking part in the class. The live class took place in February and March 2007 however the entire course including archived webcasts are now available (look on the left navigation menu from the home page).
The social networking site of choice is related to a student’s race, ethnicity and parents’ education, a new survey indicates. The finding “suggests there’s less intermingling of users from varying backgrounds on these sites than previously believed,” said study leader Eszter Hargittai of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University in Illinois. Hargittai surveyed more than 1,000 freshmen from the University of Illinois, Chicago.
MySpace is taking a page from rival Facebook and launching its own version of one of the social network’s most popular services: news feeds that alert users to what their friends are doing. “The concept of a news feed is something we are very focused on, and we’ll be well down the path in the next 30 to 45 days,” FIM chief Peter Levinsohn said at the Reuters Media Summit.
On October 30th, an association of social network companies headed by Google strategize to begin introducing a common set of standards that shall allow software developers around the world to write programs for Google’s highly popular social network webiste, Orkut, as well as others websites, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning. The approach is aimed at giving boost to development of third party softwares that are a level more than the existing softwares available with Facebook, which last year released its service to outside developers. From the time then, more than 5,000 mini or micro programs have been built to run on the Facebook site, and many of which have been adopted by millions of the site’s users. Most of those programs tap into connections among Facebook friends and spread themselves through those connections, as well as through a news feed that alerts Facebook users about the different acts of their friends on Facebook.
Yahoo! has launched another social networking service that few people are likely to use. Recently, the behind-the-times web portal unveiled something called Y! Kickstart, a service aimed at youngsters struggling to make a go of it in the real world.
MySpace and Google are preparing to launch OpenSocial— a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web. Both companies aim to standardize and simplify the development of social applications. The alliance with Google underscores MySpace’s commitment to supporting standards that foster innovation in an increasingly social Web, said Chris DeWolfe, chief executive officer and co-founder of MySpace.
OCLC, the world’s largest library research and service organization, has released the third in a series of reports that scan the information landscape to provide data, analyses and opinions about users’ behaviors and expectations in today’s networked world. The new international report, Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World examines four primary areas: Web user practices and preferences on their favorite social sites; User attitudes about sharing and receiving information on social spaces, commercial sites and library sites ; Information privacy; what matters and what doesn’t; U.S. librarian social networking practices and preferences; their views on privacy, policy and social networks for libraries.
In a world where anyone can collect hundreds of virtual ‘friends’ on websites such as Facebook, the humble dog was in danger of being left behind. But now a social networking site has been set up just for Man’s best friend – and has already attracted tens of thousands of users. Animal-lovers have posted profiles of more than 27,000 pets on DoggySnaps, which fans have cheekily dubbed Facebark
More than three-quarters of British Internet users regularly visited social networking sites in August, outpacing their peers in Germany, France, Spain and Italy, according to figures Wednesday from comScore Networks Inc. U.K. Internet users spent an average of almost six hours during the month visiting sites such as Facebook.com and Bebo.com, comScore said. The top 20 percent of U.K. visitors spent 22 hours at the sites.
Social networking – not a new idea for the twenty-something generation – but an idea that has finally crossed over into the corporate boardroom thanks to customer demand and open standards technologies built on service-oriented architectures (SOA). With 20% of employees at large companies now contributing to blogs, social networks, Wikis, and other Web 2.0 services (according to IDC in a survey of 197 workers), the trend is no surprise, with companies finding ways to capitalize on this activity with their own in-house social networks.
Social networking is often referred to as an online community of people who share interests or activities and use such tools as chat, messaging, email, video, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, etc to exchange ideas and information. What you may not realize is it is quickly changing the way people do business.
