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Web 2.0 Expo – Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business

So you think you should add a social network or blog to your business website. What planning should you do to make this an effective undertaking and one with measurable ROI? Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research presented a simple strategy from their book Groundswell: POST.

  • P – People – Access your customer’s social activities. There are different roles people play on your website/community (from Forrester’s social technographics ladder): creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives.
  • O – Objectives – Decide what you want to accomplish. Different departments in your company will probably have different objectives (research – listening, marketing – talking, sales – energizing, support – supporting, development – embracing).
  • S – Strategy – Plan for how relationships with customers will change.
  • T – Technology – Decide which social technologies to use. Since you know the objectives these will be measurable.

To create a successful community you’ll need to engage your audience by creating a place they want/need to go regularly – asking them questions, listen to their ideas, create a place they can get advice and help each other. Start with your customers, choose objectives you can measure, line up front-office backing, get the naysayers on your side, and start small, but think big. Adding community to your business website can help you understand your customers and improve your products and services to increase sales.

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Web 2.0 Expo – Real Time Web

Despite what TechCrunch may have said about Blaine Cook, his talk today on Real Time Web wasn’t delivered from under a rock.

He talked with the Web 2.0 expo crowd about how HTTP refreshing isn’t the right protocol for applications that use messaging, such as Twitter. His take is that the best messaging service out there, one that is open, free, web ready, standards based, easy to use, all these thing in one is the Jabber protocol

Jabber’s event driven messaging means that a service like twitter doesn’t have to constantly poll on status of customers when usually the result is ‘nothing new’ Event driven messaging like Jabber allows the service to ‘ping’ the Twitter service to say ‘hey, Im back’ or ‘Hey, I have a message’ Following this on, this means that the Twitter service to then send on that message to you, the subscriber once and only once when its fresh. Jabber is Client-Server not p2p, which is applicable here.

The use of jabber in Twitter makes perfect sense. What you can learn from Blaine’s experience is still a bit muddy, however. Twitter has known scalability issues, but how much of those were HTTP/Jabber problems? We just don’t know. The reality is that for the B2B business, you will likely never face their kind of subscription traffic issues. That means that Jabber should be looked at for the right projects that needs Presence, Subscription, and Messaging. It is XML and looks very much like email in its design. Look at Jabber as a choice for your Web Messaging needs.

Oh, he also laid the gauntlet by saying RSS is good for basic content subscription, but APIs should use ATOM due to parsing being cleaner. Evangelists are still liking RSS, so this was an interesting reveal.

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Web 2.0 Expo – Best Practices

Just finished my first Workshop at the web2.0 Expo

This will be a quick and dirty post between sessions (and while eating a sandwich)

Web 2.0 Best Practices, authored by Niall Kennedy

Niall’s talk focused on taking the audience though the stages of web development history in order to lay down a path for the future. No matter where your web site is today, the take home from Niall is that you have homework to do. If you have a site that doesn’t have RSS distributing your content out in feeds, you need to start here. If you already have that part in place, your next hurdle is adopting microformats

Microformats is the landing pad for preparing your website for the new semantic movement, likely to be the 3.0 of web 3.0 Microformats lets you tell search engines what your content is meant to be. hCard, hCal, and hReference are all reference implementations of microformats. Using them will improve your search engine results, this is now really now debated much.

Once your site is using Microformats, it is time to extend that content out to large platforms like Google, Facebook, MySpace and others. Widgets allow you to put your content up on sites like Facebook to use their traffic to extend your content’s reach. This is usually done through proxies; your content is updated on their site only as often as your site wants. This limits your traffic burden.

Niall did a very good job with this workshop. It was compelling to see how the decisions of the past can make educated guesses on where we are going in the future. If he’s right, this really isn’t the time to sit on your latest site redesign. If you get out infront of this microformat movement and widget revolution, you can beat your competition to the punch to getting those valuable eyeballs that drive sales in an online world

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