Acknowledge the web technology mostly driven by the enthusiasts and programmers, here is one of the best presentation to understand the semantic web..
Just several days ago, I wrote a post in my other blog about China’s decision to block Plurk. In it, I linked to a result from Google Website Trend analysis showing that Indonesia brings the most traffic to the Plurk’s website.
Needless to say, it got me really intrigued. I then play around with it, using Twitter and Facebook as a variable to analyze. And these graphs are the results :
As you can see, Indonesia ranks as the 4th country who brings the most traffic in Facebook, while in Twitter it is listed as the 8th. Combine it with the fact that it’s the biggest traffic contributor for Plurk, and you get the idea that Indonesia is in fact a very prominent country in the global mapping of social networks.
One will then begin to naturally wonder the implication of this fact. For instance, what does it mean for Indonesia ? How can we capitalize on this seemingly-crucial fact that we are renowned users of social networking sites ?
It seems to me that there are two approaches to think about this issue, – classified according to the direction the effects that will inevitably happen to us. First, there is an inward implication, – although not specifically stated -, that people around the world have recognized the fact that us Indonesians are here to stay. It clearly shows that Indonesians are not just some sporadic users of social network. Instead, we are a large group of devoted people who regularly engage in connecting and networking via the Internet. This can only translate as a good thing because bit by bit, Indonesians will then gain stronger voice in this world. On the individual level, people from Indonesia will also get more opportunity to do some serious networking without being associated with any unnecessary facets of the image of a third-world country.
Secondly, and this is the harder part, is the outward responsibility we have with the fact. Now that we are being recognized as prominent entities in Social Networking world, what are we going to do with it ? Remember Peter Parker’s words when he said, “With great power comes great responsibility” ? Of course, it can be argued that we can then make contributions by building our own social networking sites. And we did that successfully, at least to an extent. But for me, it looks like we could go further than that. Why haven’t we incubate some ideas, – and then execute it, which will be useful for the whole world in a global level? You know, products as revolutionary as Blogspot, WordPress and Twitter.
This is what I offer for you to ponder as I close this fact. I am suggesting that this is the focus that we should develop. Indonesia are so full of talented developers and workers, but few who have the required ability to perform as a brilliant thinker in a conceptual level. And we all know that ideas are where all the great things in life come from.
Not too long ago, the infamous Michael Arrington of TechCrunch reported a rumor where he stated that Google was ( or maybe still is ) in talks to acquire Twitter. For a starter, it may be worthwhile to revisit his argument as to why Twitter is so valuable to acquire these days :
“More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually (The W Hotel pestered me until I told them to just leave me alone), or simply gather the information to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.
And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer.
People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff.
Twitter knows it, too. They’re going to build their business model on it. Forget small time payments from users for pro accounts and other features, all they have to do is keep growing the base and gather more and more of those emotional grunts. In aggregate it’s extremely valuable. And as Google has shown, search is vastly monetizable – somewhere around 40% of all online advertising revenue goes to ads on search listings today.”
In other words, if left alone, Twitter will surely emerge as the new giant in the search industry, – complete with its abundant advertising dollars. The only question is, can Twitter sustain its current operation and mature to be a major player it seems destined to be ? Financially and technically, maintaining its operation as probably one of the strongest social media today must be a very complicated issue. Yet I don’t want to dwell on that.
What I want to talk about is Google’s take on this issue. If the rumor is true, it seems to me that it signals that they want to be the lone, solitary giant in the search engine realm of business. Not that there is anything wrong about that. We all know that as per today, they are the best in terms of skills and resources to serve the biggest search engine in the world.
What makes it more interesting is that Google actually proceeded to make its move by holding talks and discussions with Twitter before the other giant of the industry, Microsoft. Compared to the non-committal and complacent Microsoft, this implies that they again have a better sense of direction as to where the world Internet trends are shifting. And a good business forecasting ability is a crucial pre-requisite if one is to stand on the shoulder of giants.
It is now fascinating time as we wait in suspense whether Google and Twitter made progress in their discussions. On the one hand, Twitter CEO Evan Williams has already sold a successful product he made in the past to Google ( Blogspot ). On the other hand, there is this antitrust issues that put some constraints, – at least categorically, which dictates that Google should proceed carefully here. Again, Arrington noted about this too.
As we wait on any updates on this matter, I’ll just state that Google is showing that it is still going strong as a major giant here. And mind you, it is not a sleeping giant; but rather a very alert and sensible one.
Twitalyzer Home Screen
This week we witnessed the birth of yet another Twitter tool. Its name is Twitalyzer. What makes it special in the midst of so many other Twitter-related tools and applications ? Well, at first glance, it did not became apparent for me either as it looks like one of those tools to analyze your “influence” on Twitter by measuring such variables like the number of times people reply to you and mention your name.
That is, until I discovered a tiny menu on the top right of its homepage, mentioning “Twitalyze Brands”. Interested, I clicked on the menu and voila ! I was taken to a page where there was this big title banner of “Twitalyzer Brand”. Now it got me intrigued, and just for the sake of testing, I entered “Nokia” as the brand to be analyzed. I waited like three minutes before I got to see the results, but it’s all expected because Nokia is such a big brand and must be getting a lot of mention from the Twitter crowd. Fair enough.
It was not until I got to the result page that I realize that this is indeed an excellent tool. Of course, by now we need not mention again the importance of online reputation management. But until now, I was only aware of Twitter-search based tools in order to do just that. Twitalyzer Brand takes it one step further by giving you the important parameters right in the first page of the result of your brand.
Twitalyzer Nokia Result
After it has finished analyzing Nokia, – in this example -, Twitalyzer Brand told me that “NOKIA most recent brand strength in Twitter was rated as mind-boggling based on a calculated score of 88.4 out of 100…” Furthermore, it also measured the brand as having 70.5% of signal-to-noise ratio, 4:1 positive brand favor, 22.3% of brand passion, and 77.5% of clout. Now, of course I’m aware that for the curious side of us, it may not be enough. We might want to know on what calculations and algorithms such assessments are based upon, but that’s beside the point here.
My point is that, at the very least, Twitalyzer Brand can be used as a very splendid method to analyze your brand’s mention on Twitter, – and thus, manage your online reputation. Bear with me for a second, and I’ll tell you why. Excited by a neat execution of its analysis on Nokia, I clicked “learn more” under the parameter of “brand favor”. I then was taken to another page where it gave me the definition of “brand favor” ( “the ratio of citations that are generally positive to those that are generally negative” ) and the list of actual public updates where people mentioned Nokia in their tweets, – both positively and negatively. I don’t know about you, but for me, that alone is a big enough appeal to use it as a tool to scan feedbacks from people who used my products.
I suggest you do the similar thing with the other parameters. Explore the site. Also don’t forget to take a look at their features of “Time-Based Analysis”, “Benchmark Your Success” and “Twitter Brand 100” list, which are located in the bottom of the page. If there is a time that I recommend a young site, then this is it.
NOTE : The Twitalyzer site can also analyze your personal Twitter statistics other than your brand’s. Just click on the “Twitalyze People” menu in the top right of the page.
According to the Wikipedia, the term “Enterprise 2.0”refers to :
“social software used in “enterprise” (business) contexts. It includes social and networked modifications to company intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication. In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes structure prior to use, enterprise social software tends to encourage use prior to providing structure.”
I believe that we do not need to delve further into the importance of incorporating Enterprise 2.0 in your business. The fact that you are reading this is a clear enough sign that you realize the need to evolve into such kind of enterprise, rather than staying true to the prehistoric status quo of one-way content feeding of Web 1.0. The question is how are we going to do this. In this post, I am going to suggest three ways which seem to me are the keys to plot your successful presence in the world of social networking :
These three simple steps may seem obvious to you as an avid web user. However, one concept that runs behind them all spell the difference between the successful web personas like Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki, – to the rest of the world who seem to never raise up beyond the level of mediocrity. This concept is contained in one simple word : consistency. As I have mentioned once in my previous post, whatever you do in the Internet, you need to update, update and update your page or status or blog. There’s nothing worse than seeing a company’s blog which hasn’t been updated for a long time. It gives your audience the impression that you can’t finish what you started, or even that you are a company that lacks commitment to do your job. Hardly the impression you would want your company to have, would you ?
The good news is, once you hold fast to the concept of consistency, the three methods I mentioned above are easy enough to do, – or at least to manage. You can update them all yourselves, or you may opt to delegate the tasks to a staff specifically dedicated to do just that. However you choose to do it, just don’t give up easily. After all, tenacity is a close sibling of consistency. Do what you need to do, and embrace the fact that you are entering the new, excited realm of Enterprise 2.0. Good luck !
While it might have been several days ago that the blogosphere was being given a taste of yet another uproar by TechCrunch and Last.fm; I find the underlying issue of what happens between them disturbingly abandoned by the much-heated discussion that takes place afterwards. That’s why I decided to write this post.
It all began when TechCrunch published an article by Erick Schonfeld where they make public the rumor that Last.fm just handed over their users’ music listening data to the RIAA. Basically, they stated that Last.fm did basically just that, – albeit unknowingly, to help RIAA target some million users who have downloaded and played illegal music in their computer.
Now for those of you who are not familiar with Last.fm, they are a social network owned by none other than CBS that makes a good use of their music recommendation engine. When a user listens to a song ( and install Last.fm software in his/her computer ), the software will “scrobble” the song and send the data to the website, – telling it that such and such user played this song. This will in turn lead to a powerful music recommendation service because “you shift the song’s importance on the site. It’ll be recommended to different people, because you’ve listened to it. It’ll move up our music charts and maybe more people will hear it because you thought it was good.”
It’s important to pause here for a moment and not get ourselves get drowned in the details. To get into the background of what actually happened, – you can read the TechCrunch post here, Last.fm’s response here -, and a good neutral, third party post about it from Ars Technica here. As you would be able to see, a lot of the follow-ups / comments in the said posts tend to revolve around two big defensive fronts. Most of them were busy trying to define who is right and who is wrong, with some sporadic comments about other issues altogether, – like the legality of downloaded songs and its implications to worldwide music sales, and so on. This in itself is not wrong as it helps million of people learn about issues they otherwise might have not learned, but I feel that it masks the biggest, underlying issue of these all : responsible journalism and what it should have said.
It is worrying that TechCrunch based their news story on an uncorroborated rumor. Yes, the writer of the post tried to contact Last.fm and received an unsatisfying response which was not a categorical denial. But when it couldn’t be proven that Last.fm didn’t do it, – surely they can’t state as a fact that Last.fm did it ? For me, it’s a classic case of “my word against your word”, which is a silly thing to publish because it’s not a factual truth yet.
Granted, TechCrunch has maintained an understandable stance that they presented the story for what it is : a rumor. Schonfeld mentioned in his update of the post that “Despite my attempts to corroborate it and the subsequent detail I’ve been able to gather, I still don’t have enough information to determine whether it is absolutely true. But I still don’t have enough information to determine that it is absolutely false either. What I do have are a lot of unanswered questions about how exactly Last.fm shares user data with the record industry.”
Fair enough. But still it seems to me that one can’t just publish every rumor he finds and call it journalism. It has to have a certain standard and, yes, ethical codes if you will ; where journalism can thrive and serve the general public responsibly. It is really saddening when many that take part in the uproar caused by the post fail to see this basic premise. Instead of petty bickering about who’s wrong or right, – don’t you think that we need to have a better standard of journalism ? I rest my case.
Online Reputation Management is something you and your company can not do without these days. It’s because the need for brand and reputation management continues to increase in importance as consumer time spent on the social web replaces traditional media. Furthermore, let’s not forget the fact that :
· Customers are online – Customers who find products and services via internet channels have various experiences. Many consumers blog, write reviews, make comments and share opinions on social networks. It’s important to have a good handle on customers that are publishing both negative and positive information so the brand can monitor and engage in the right way.
· Journalists are online – Public and media relations is an effective marketing/communications channel for merchants, networks and in some cases, affiliates. Journalists are increasingly researching stories online and the way companies represent brands can influence whether a particular one is considered for a story or not.
· Competitors are online - Brand monitoring online and within digital media provides companies a real opportunity for competitive research. Discover what other brands are doing to be effective and whether they publish negative information about your brand in order to attract sales from products and services.
However you choose to look at it, it means one thing and one thing only : that the future of your brands are also online. It does not necessarily mean that you will kill your brand if you don’t engage in these activities, – but rather that you may hurt your real-world business if you neglect to nurture your online reputation management. Take some time to study it. As usual, followings are a couple of good articles about it for you to dig further :
“A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.”
In my last post, we talked about social media and its implications to your PR strategy. I promised you that we were going to cover the issue of listening on what people say about you and/or your company.
Before we start, it will be very crucial to remember that listening is a very big part of communication. In fact, it could even be argued that listening is a part of life that we can’t live without. Any good communicators out there will confirm this fact. Just ask somebody you admire for his / her communication skills. It’s undeniable.
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In the context of Social Media, it can become quite confusing, – especially for a first-timer -, to scan and monitor what people say about you. As in real-life communication, it takes a skill to listen. The good news is, it’s easy to acquire the ability to listen in Social Media. Enter the “Search” function.
To elaborate more on this, we’re going to use Twitter as an example. By now, you must know already about what is it. If you have not join Twitter, do so now. You owe it to yourself. Find some important people to follow, – or better yet -, some people who is relevant to your field.
Assuming that you have already done all of the above, what you need to do now is searching the public timeline for the topic pertaining to your field. Owing to Twitter’s wild popularity, there are some excellent tools out there to do this very thing. Make use of them. Followings are three of them that I myself use most often :
Official Twitter Search page
Now all you need to do is go to their sites and type your topic, much as the way you use Google or other search engines. For example : Peter is in the business of airlines. He would want to search for “airlines”, “flying”, “flight” or other similar search terms. The search tool will then give him tweets from people that used such words in it. Don’t just stop there, however. Push your listening act a little bit further. You might want to even search for your brand. Type “Apple” for instance, and you will see what I mean.
Once you reach this point, it will become easy for you to see what people say about you and/or your brands. Don’t forget other valuable information like what their needs, preferences or anything else that might help you to sell more. Good luck !
First and foremost, let me state that this post is just an introduction to a Social Media Strategy, – and as such, will quote a lot from other authoritative sources in the field. Among those experts that helped elaborate about this issue are well-known Web Strategist and Gurus like :
First of all, let’s take a look at why should we need to learn more about Social Media and utilizing it in your Public Relations strategy. There are so many apparent reasons for this, but among the most interesting ones are :
To be more concise, Chris Brogan sums it up succinctly as this list of goals :
Seems obvious ? Indeed. But there are some more important factors to remember before you devise your company’s Social Media PR Strategy. The essential things-to-remember must include :
I encourage you to dig more about this if you aspire to succeed in using Social Media as part of your PR strategy. As I said in the beginning of this post, there are some valuable written gems ( read : blog posts ) out there. Read them up. You can start with the following well-written advices from the experts :
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At this point, it may not be necessary to explain what blogging is. You should know, you are reading one of them. Yet, corporate blogging is a whole different game to personal blogging. This blog is an example of corporate blogging.
Depending on the direction, corporate blogging is classified into 2 groups :
Focusing on external corporate blogging, let’s pose a question : Do my company needs a corporate blog ? There really is no easy way to answer this, but some issues you need to ponder are :
Those are issues at the very basic level. There are many dimensions that you need to at least be aware about before you decide to take the proverbial plunge. To help your research, the following references may be particularly helpful :
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