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

Share this with the next person you meet who says, “I don’t get Twitter!”.

The folks at Twitter have put together a fine deck of slides for businesses who are still struggling with how to use the Twitter platform. The same insights can be used for personal tweeting too but I prefer to see Twitter as a very effective business tool. Below is one of the slides that explains you don’t even need a Twitter account if you want to listen to what people are saying about your brand. The slides are a must read for all businesses or business owners. Download the PDF here.

Nike Stages a Takeover of Fuel TV for 6.0 Line

Starbucks Drops Name on Seattle Store and adds Alcohol

Razorfish Study Says Brands Aren’t Doing Enough to Engage Consumers on the Social Web

Music Critic Curmudgeon Tells Blogs and Twitter to Get Off His Lawn

GE Smart grid yields net-zero energy home

How Not To Use Twitter Author Alice Hoffman Takes a Beating from the Twitterverse

“Facing the Future” as delivered by HRH The Prince of Wales, St James’s Palace State Apartments, London

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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Once again, Twitter leads me to a great article. It is hard to believe that some people still “don’t get” Twitter but when I use it as I feel it is best used, as a business tool, it is incomparable for exposing me to some great thought leaders. Unlike RSS feeds, by following certain people on Twitter I find the good stuff that’s important to me more directly.

Today’s example is via Jay Rosen @jayrosen_nyu – here’s his Twitter profile – “I teach journalism at NYU, write the blog PressThink, direct NewAssignment.Net, and try to grok new media. I don’t do lifecasting but mindcasting on Twitter.” In the somewhat twisted vernacular of 140 characters he tweeted the following – “Right on, @AmandaRMichel. “Redundancy is a network fact-checking tool.” See her essay on OffTheBus: http://tr.im/pJu3 Learn, @ivortossell.”

I followed the link. The article that was linked to at the Columbia Journalism Review is called Get Off The Bus and it is a fascinating overview of the future of journalism. As Amanda Michel writes – “OffTheBus (OTB) [is] a citizen-powered campaign news site co-sponsored by The Huffington Post and Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment, at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Inspired by Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus, which chronicled a campaign’s ability to manipulate the press, we instructed our citizen journalists to steer clear of the horse race and the top-down coverage that dominates the mainstream press.”

For anyone interested in the decline of newspapers and how journalism will morph into the future you could do worse than follow Rosen. Insights like this are worth following him for – another tweet of his – “In 1976, 27% had a great deal of confidence in our press; in 2006, 4.5% did. During this time journalists became far more educated. So: WTF?”

Get Off The Bus is a must read too.

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