Social Cache.
A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

Although Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester Research, posted his 5 Phases Of Social Experience article a month ago, it’s worth considering those 5 phases again. Having read them when he first posted them and now having had time to distill my thoughts, the first thing to strike me is how linear Owyang’s phases are and how he seems so sure that the unfolding of these phases will follow this trajectory; the greatest minds on earth still do not understand our own universe so it’s hard to see how one person can unravel the ever-changing world of the Social Web, although I will admit that he has exceptional skills at divining social media. I like his optimism but as we have been through phases 1 – 3 and are slowly entering phase 4, his phase 5. Era Of Social Commerce feels like a stretch – without phase 5 he would have only had to write about phase 4 if you get my drift. [Owyang's report 'The Future Of The Social Web can be found here].

My current interest is in Owyang’s third phase where OpenID and Facebook Connect come in to play, giving Social Web users the ability to share easily with their friends all of their web experiences. As Owyang says, it’s like taking your social connections along for the ride. Phase 4, Social Context, is unfolding right now. One company using Facebook to qualify visitors’ preferences, behaviors, and friends to help you get answers to questions from your peer group, is Aardvark who I wrote about just yesterday. I think Owyang is very optimistic though when he says “Consumers will opt in to share this information—about friends, preferences, demographics, and history—with online communities and other sites in exchange for a more-relevant Web experience.” That sounds like the wishful thinking of social media marketers – the wild card has always been social web users and what information they are willing to share. Facebook is almost a second internet with its millions of members yet Facebook doesn’t currently share that user data.

Phase 5 is problematic; I agree with Owyang’s premise but only time will tell if this theory pans out.
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Jeremiah Owyang’s 5 Phases Of Social Experience

1. Era of Social Relationships: We’ve already reached maturity with this stage. It took off in the 1990s with people connected to each other using simple profiles and “friending” features to share information, discussions, and media. It is the foundation of the changes to come.

2. Era of Social Functionality: Although not yet mature, we entered this phase in 2007. Today’s social networks have evolved into platforms that support social interactive applications and provide new meaning and utility to communities. Most of these applications appear to be disposable, and we’ve yet to tap into the true business functionality of applications such as e-commerce and workplace productivity. Even when maturity arises with this era, consumers will share their experiences but won’t connect them across networks. Among U.S. consumers who visit MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn at least monthly, 42 percent juggle at least two social network IDs. And 63 percent are also in discussion forums with yet another ID. This creates friction for consumers who must manage multiplying personal information and username/password combinations. It’s hard to keep track of connections when your contacts may be in Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning, Twitter, or a hundred other places.

3. Era of Social Colonization: Technologies like OpenID will let individuals traverse the Internet with their social connections along for the ride. The boundaries of social networks and traditional sites will blur, making every site a social experience—even if they don’t choose to participate. New browsers and identity technologies will let consumers choose to surf the Web and see what sites their friends have visited—and what they thought of the information there. Because they trust friends more than they trust companies, they’ll lean on their network to make decisions about what they’re reading and buying. To add value, social networks will aggregate members’ activities and those of their network, collected on the members’ profile pages, merging these into messaging systems and newsfeeds. Users will not only control their communications with other sites, but also see what their friends are doing on the open Web.

4. Era of Social Context: As sites begin to recognize people’s personal identities and their social relationships, they will customize experiences based on visitors’ preferences, behaviors, and friends. This stage will enable more-intense social applications, allowing social networks to absorb features of email and to become a base of operations for everyone’s online experiences. Consumers will opt in to share this information—about friends, preferences, demographics, and history—with online communities and other sites in exchange for a more-relevant Web experience. This will build bridges between social networks, sites, and any other medium that can connect with these identification tools.

5. Era of Social Commerce: As social networks become the repository for identities and relationships, they’ll become more powerful than corporate Web sites and CRM systems. Communities will be the driving force for innovation. Because of this, brands will cater to communities, resulting in a power shift toward the connected customer. Versatile IDs will blend social sites and the Web into a single common experience. Users will control their identities and what they choose to expose. They’ll use collaboration tools to define how they want brands to serve them, and a suite of community tools to manage companies.

Aardvark Founders. Pic: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

I have written here often of how technology only shortens the distance between people on the social web. In other words, using social web tools to communicate with friends and family is an extension of our social activities offline. As I write this on July 5th, I recall yesterday seeing tens of thousands gathered on bridges in downtown Portland, alongside the lake in Lake Oswego and milling around in Tigard, Or, to watch the firework displays commemorating Independence Day. Families with kids, couples and teens all very comfortable with each other for a few hours; it is very natural for us to gather with strangers and witness a familiar event.

Opening a browser on a computer or a mobile device today means participation in the social web. Not just because of one’s involvement in social networks but also by letting your friends or family know of your geo-location by allowing a mobile device app to broadcast your whereabouts for instance. Emailing and texting friends, tweeting and updating your Facebook status all let those following you know of your involvement on the social web every day.

This is of course very familiar to us, we surf the web in our own familiar ways using social networking tools, yet companies that wish to harness the power to advertise to this web of millions of people have been stymied for some time, stuck in social media channels wondering how to budge these masses even a quarter of an inch closer to their products. The web and those using it don’t ever stop moving but you can’t simply plant a billboard alongside this viral highway – the billboard’s message will remain right there where it was positioned, as we all go about our daily electronic sojourns.

Rob Glazer of Real. Pic: Kevin P. Casey for the The New York Times

I recently discovered two articles in the Business section of the June 28th 09 edition of the New York Times. The articles cover two companies and their products – one is RealNetworks, a familiar face in technology, the other a new company called Aardvark. Real is featured for launching new technology for hardware devices and Aardvark for creating a social web service that helps you reach hundreds of your online friends and peer group for answers to any of your questions. Real brings us technology based on the premise that the company thinks we need their product and Aardvark brings us technology that embraces the social web by connecting us easily with people we trust to answer our questions. [I used Aardvark yesterday to ask a question of my followers - "who uses online music subscriptions, which one is better and why?" and I received 6 great responses, even one from a friend in Sweden who urged me to use a service called Spotify.] It works.

Aardvark doesn’t bother all of my 1700+ Facebook friends either. As the NYT article points out –
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Let’s keep this simple – the scenario that is unfolding in the battle between the big three internet companies that matter, Google, Twitter and Facebook, is about access to personal data; what you care to share with Facebook and Twitter is important and Google wants in on it. With Twitter and Facebook it lies in the data surrounding experiential awareness and reputation management; the who, the what, the where. In Google’s case it is, in the words of Fred Vogelstein, about how “for the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world.”

Dispassionate atlas versus he says, she says.

That’s not a pithy statement; what you and I say about a brand online is becoming more important than indexing – Vogelstein again – “Internet users behave[d] differently on Facebook than anywhere else online: They use[d] their real names, connect[ed] with their real friends, link[ed] to their real email addresses, and share[d] their real thoughts, tastes, and news. Google, on the other hand, knows [knew] relatively little about most of its users other than their search histories and some browsing activity.” Characters in [ ] my edits.

He goes on – “In [Facebook CEO] Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this “social graph” to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.” Google can currently search and index your tweets but Facebook is a walled garden and unless Facebook grants access to that data within, then Google is out of luck. The battle for dominance in the “promised land of online brand advertising” has been engaged.

In the past Facebook users have spoken out angrily about any perceived misuse of their personal data and Facebook has always backed down. Last April Google announced the ability to create detailed profiles so that anyone searching for a persons name could find that profile – it remains to be seen if there was a heavy take up of that service offering.

What does this intercine warfare between Facebook and Google mean for you and I? I’d say that now, more than ever, we have to pay attention to our personal brand reputation and brands must monitor all instances of conversations, both positive and negative, online.

Related posts:

John Battelle – Google Vs Facebook? What we Learn from Twitter

SEO and SEM will be Dead As You Know It in 6 Months

Tony “Frosty” Welch – Who Killed Social Media?

Update June 24th 09 – Facebook Messages to Become Public by Default

Admit it, your mom is on Facebook.

Not surprisingly, Nielsen has just released a report claiming that two-thirds of the world’s population visit social networking or blogging sites.

The data was collected from December 2007 to December 2008 and even more rapid growth is expected since time spent on both social networking and blogging sites is increasing at three times the rate of overall internet growth.

In the beginning, social networking was primarily geared towards a younger audience but Facebook has played a prominent role with drawing in a much older audience. People ranging from 35 to 49 years old have given Facebook its biggest growth with 24.1 million new visitors while 50 to 64 year olds now number over 13.6 million. Rejoice, your parents are now probably on Facebook.

Image from Blog of Mr Tweet.

Recently on the blog known as MrTweet a question was posed – “How are you using Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter differently?”

If I had been asked I would have responded as follows: Those three networking platforms can be grouped into a historical context – Facebook past, Linkedin future/present, and Twitter future.

Facebook is the past. I have been a member of Facebook for what seems like an eternity but in fact it has been a little under two years. I have 1,472 “friends” as of writing and it’s fair to say that I only know about 15% of these “friends” very well. As a minor music celebrity I have attracted a lot of musicians, bands and labels. As Director, Insights & Digital Media at Nemo and as someone who speaks regularly at conferences on social media as well as online music issues, I have attracted those cohorts too. Just this past week my sister and brother who still reside in the UK joined Facebook and brought along with them various nephews, nieces, cousins, aunts and uncles. I now have no excuse for not being in touch with my family more regularly – technology shortens the distance between us. On Facebook that is not necessarily a good thing.

The author centre, tagged in a picture from the early 80’s

Facebook is historical white noise to me. I am constantly tagged in pictures and videos and more often than not in an unflattering light. There I am at a wedding in 1987 clearly drunk, and there I am in some unnamed establishment sitting next to some old girlfriend who is probably mortified to see that photo in such a public forum after all these years. [Insert landscape and memory essay here.] I have spent many hours un-tagging myself in photos and videos just to have someone tag them right back after I’ve moved along. One day soon I fully expect to find a video of myself dancing naked on a table at a party. And that’s what is wrong with Facebook for me; the complete lack of control of message, my message.

Facebook really is for college students who want to catalogue images and videos of their crazy drunken selves for all the world to see; images they will live to regret when applying for a job. Closing your account is the only means of control on FB.

For the more mature types on Facebook [apparently there has been a surge of new members in the 40+ demographic] there is the shock of discovering that all those folks in high school or college -the ones that you had left behind and wiped from memory – are now waiting in your email inbox as “friend” requests. There was of course a reason for leaving all that behind. I could go on. Clearly Facebook is best left to the young who actually seem to enjoy being stalked across social networks.

Linkedin is Future/Present. Linkedin I term as future/present because I use it to store current details about my career activities [present]. I have built a decent network of like-minded business people with whom I can share job opportunities and details of event activities and/or my role within Nemo [future client work.] There are useful forums where I can post a topical question and via the crowdsourcing effect of Linkedin I often receive a lot of very intelligent answers [I wouldn't try this on Facebook for e.g.]

Linkedin is a dry world whereas Facebook is a week at the beach in Mexico during Spring Break. Linkedin is quiet time in the study where you get things done. It really is all business.

This brings me to Twitter. Although millions of users are on the Twitter platform its audience is in the low millions compared to FB and LI. Many of my peers who open a Twitter account leave me a message soon after joining that invariably includes the phrase “I don’t get it…” Fair enough, but hey everyone what is it you want to get? If you want to have a tool that is the perfect blend of Facebook [without Spring Break] and Linkedin [without retiring to the study] then Twitter is for you.

Twitter put simply is micro-blogging. Used wisely Twitter gives your followers a real-time window into your social, business and working world down to the minute. Use it unwisely you will find yourself in a lonely corner of Twitter twittering to yourself with a dunces hat on. I put Twitter in the future column even though other social media types put it in the present because I believe that when it is used purposefully it has a transcendental power and therefore we will see it being used much more widely in future.

And by purposefully I mean by intent which then leads to a question – what are your goals when using social media? Remember, we have to put technology to one side, this is not about technology it is about doing something that comes very naturally to all human beings [sociopaths excepted,] – it’s called socializing. Technology has shortened the distance between us but it hasn’t changed why we socialize. It is worth noting that Twitter is arguably more successful than any other social network platform for helping to get offline groups organized around conferences and such – they are known as Tweetups. And for e.g., I know of someone tweeting upon arrival at PDX airport asking for a ride downtown who within minutes was picked up and given a ride from a fellow tweeter – Twitter can be that hyper-local.

On a grander global and political scale, Wikipedia notes: Twitter has been used as a “social justice tool” to connect groups of people in critical situations. On April 10 2008, James Buck, a graduate journalism student at UC Berkeley, and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were arrested in Egypt for photographing an anti-government protest. On his way to the police station Buck used his mobile phone to send the message “Arrested” to his 48 “followers” on Twitter. Those followers contacted UC Berkeley, the US Embassy in Cairo, and a number of press organizations on his behalf. Buck was able to send updates about his condition to his “followers” while being detained. He was released the next day from the Mahalla jail after the college hired a lawyer for him.

Should you be arrested or simply lost just remember Twitter is always at your fingertips – text 40404.
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No, really? Just a quickie:

You can ‘friend’ Tide on Facebook

As for P.& G, the company permits Facebook to talk about the results of only a single P.& G. promotion, presumably its most successful to date: for Crest Whitestrips. The promotion began in fall 2006, when P.& G. invited Facebook members in 20 college campus networks to become Crest Whitestrips “fans” on the product’s Facebook Page. Facebook said it was a great success, attracting 14,000 fans.

One could argue, however, that with the additional enticements that Crest provided — thousands of free movie screenings, as well as sponsored Def Jam concerts — a brand of hemorrhoid cream could have attracted a similar number of nominal “fans.”

Read the article here, unless you feel it’s ok to ‘friend’ a detergent, or Spraychel..

The Head of Digital at P&G doesn’t think it works either..