It turns out the current financial crisis in the US is creating one boom market – online business social networks. Sign-ups and usage of LinkedIn (or as I explain it to people, “Facebook for business people”) is soaring as people who are afraid they will lose their jobs enrol and update their CVs. Apparently LinkedIn is up to nearly 30 million members, mainly in the US, while German-based network Xing has hit 6.5 million members.
27 September 2008
LinkedIn grows, for all the wrong reasons
Posted in Business/corporate, e-commerce, Social media | 2 Comments »
21 September 2008
Porn loses its lustre online
From the Zazoo blog:
I have found a new favourite technology writer – Robert X Cringely at Infoworld. His recent article “Is Sarah Palin more popular than porn? Search me“, is a hoot. He cites a new book by Hitwise general manager Bill Tancer, which shows that searching for social media is now more popular than searching for porn online. As Cringely (yes, that’s his real name, not a pseudonym) writes, “‘As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased,’ said Tancer, [who] indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.
“I’m guessing Tancer has not visited many social networks, or that all his Facebook friends are old farts. Because when you’re age 18 to 24, social networks ARE pornography. In fact, they’re better. Have you seen some of those profiles? Two words: humena humena.”
I never knew how ‘humena humena’ was spelled before – you learn something new every day!
He goes on to write about something (or someone) else who has gone on to become more popular than porn on the Internet: Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
“Hitwise also measures the most popular searches for political terms. You can guess which lipstick-wearing pitbull of a hockey mom tops the charts there. Per the Washington Post: ‘… in her first two days in the national spotlight, US Internet searches on all things Palin outnumbered any other politician in the past three years…. In many cases, her name was searched alongside the word ‘hot.’ I’m guessing that also includes searches for Palin’s head photo-shopped onto various nude or bikini clad models.
“Does that qualify as porn? If so, I think Tancer needs to revisit his conclusions about social nets.”
A geek with a sharp sense of humour – got to love it.
Posted in Business/corporate, e-marketing, Media/journalism, Social media | Leave a Comment »
30 July 2008
Some ideas on measuring social network impact
Everyone is talking about the value of online social networks for business, but how on earth do you measure how well it’s working? Gary Stein has just written a terrific piece for the Clickz Network outlining three ways you can, as he describes it, measure the value of friends. Those ways are:
Volume: Perceived Value of Your Page - the number of friends generated and the rate at which they have joined up. As Stein writes, “Part of the value that each friend gives you is not only the actual connection, but — because the connection is made public (that is, the number of friends you’ve made is put right on your page for all to see) — that connection also communicates to other visitors. It’s the difference of walking by an empty café versus walking by a café with a line out the door.”
Conversion: Take up of Your Offers – The key thing, Stein writes, is to keep track of how well your unique content or offers is taken up. “Have a very clear single call to action on the page and make sure it is communicated via e-mails, alerts, or RSS feeds.”
Advocates: The Best of the Best Friends – 10% of your traffic will only visit once or twice, while your top 10% will come back constantly. “The key task is to be able to isolate this top group and have a plan for bringing them more closely into a relationship. A big part of the reason you’ll be on a social network is to have your messages passed along by others. The top 10 percent are probably your best chance of catalyzing that spread.”
Stein predicts that next wave of analytics will be centred around social networks, with measurement tools similar to those produced by the search engines. In the meantime, companies could do much worse than following Stein’s advice and work on maximising activities that boost those three measures.
Posted in Business/corporate, e-commerce, e-marketing, Social media | 2 Comments »
10 July 2008
Social networking is ‘the new black’
At the Supernova technology conference in San Francisco last month, there were plenty of practical examples of how social networking is being used in day-to-day life. A report on the conference on the Knowledge@Wharton site included comments from Google’s director of product management, Joe Kraus, who said, “People have been endlessly fascinated by one another for a very long time. Social networking is not new; we just have new ways to do it.”
He cited as an example “his own recent behavior in choosing an anniversary gift for his wife. He searched and found that candy is traditional for a sixth anniversary, then set up a message on his G-mail account, saying he needed ideas for a candy-based gift.
“A friend emailed to tell him of an extraordinary baker who constructs specialty cakes and, thanks to her suggestion, his sixth anniversary gift became an elaborate cake in the shape of a colorful purse. So, said Kraus, he went from solitary information discovery to social information discovery – and a much better result than he could have achieved on his own.”
”…Most important, Kraus sees the web eventually becoming entirely social. ‘Today, social computing is something you do at a specific site,” said Kraus. “But we’re realizing that being social is not a site. It’s a concept.’
“We won’t get to that entirely social web, he added, until we find ways to allow users to do three things: establish a single identity to log on to many sites; share private resources such as photos or contact lists without handing out private credentials (such as an email account password); and distribute information across multiple social applications.”
Posted in Business/corporate, e-commerce, e-marketing, Media/journalism, Social media | 1 Comment »
Tags: e-commerce, Facebook, Gmail, Google, internet, MySpace, Social media, social networking, social web, Supernova, Wharton
