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The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras

Admin — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 05:09:09 +0000

The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras

Expect the Groundswell to continue, in which people connect to each other –rather than institutions. Consumer adoption of social networks is increasing a rapid pace, brands are adopting even during a recession, so expect the space to rapidly innovate to match this trend. Clients can acces this report; but to summarize what we found, in the executive summary we state:

Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience. Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems; eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products.

We found that technologies trigger changes in consumer adoption, and brands will follow, resulting in five distinct waves, they consist of:

The Five Eras of the Social Web:

1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services

Timing of the Five Overlapping Eras:It’s important to note that these eras aren’t sequential, but instead are overlapping. We’ve already entered and have seen maturity for the era of social relationships, have entered social functionality but haven’t seen true utility, and are starting to see threads of social colonization with early technologies like Facebook connect. Soon these federated identities will empower people to enter the era of social context with personalized and social content. The following diagram demonstrates how we should expect to see the eras play out in the future –with social commerce the furthest out.

Interviews with 24 of the top Social Companies:Research isn’t done in a vacuum, that’s why we conducted qualitative research to find out what we should come to expect. We came to these conclusions based on interviews with executives, product managers, and strategists at the following 24 companies: Appirio, Cisco Eos, Dell, Facebook, Federated Media Publishing, Flock, Gigya, Google (Open Social/stack team), Graphing Social Patterns (Dave McClure), IBM (SOA Team), Intel (social media marketing team), KickApps, LinkedIn, Meebo, Microsoft (Live team), MySpace, OpenID Foundation (Chris Messina), Plaxo, Pluck, Razorfish, ReadWriteWeb, salesforce.com, Six Apart, and Twitter.

How Brands Should PrepareWhat’s interesting isn’t this vision for the future, but what it holds in store for brands, as a result, companies should prepare by:

Don’t Hesitate: These changes are coming at a rapid pace, and we’re in three of these ears by end of year. Brands should prepare by factoring in these eras into their near term plans. Don’t be left behind and let competitors connect with your community before you do.

Prepare For Transparency: People will be able to surf the web with their friends, as a result you must have a plan. Prepare for every webpage and product to be reviewed by your customers and seen by prospects –even if you choose not to participate.

Connect with Advocates: Focus on customer advocates, they will sway over prospects, and could defend against detractors. Their opinion is trusted more than yours, and when the power shifts to community, and they start to define what products should be, they become more important than ever.

Evolve your Enterprise Systems: Your enterprise systems will need to connect to the social web. Social networks and their partners are quickly becoming a source of customer information and lead generation beyond your CRM system. CMS systems will need to inherit social features –pressure your vendors to offer this, or find a community platform.

Shatter your Corporate Website: In the most radical future, content will come to consumers –rather than them chasing it– prepare to fragment your corporate website and let it distribute to the social web. Let the most important information go and spread to communities where they exist; fish where the fish are.

This project took a team effort, and I’d like to thank Josh Bernoff as a guiding force in my career, Emily Bowen who kept the project going, Cynthia Pflaum for the quantitative data, Megan Chromik in our editing team for the polish, and Jon Symons in our PR team for the media outreach.

This was cross posted on the Web Strategy Blog.

Using Google Search to find interesting Twitter Users

Admin — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 17:15:00 +0000

Posted by: Justin Parks In: Featured| Social Networking| twitter

Currently: Home » Featured » Using Google Search to find interesting Twitter Users

I recently wrote an article about using Google search results to find out who has made one of your tweets a favourite by a particular search string and things have developed from there.

Alexandre Gamela, writes on a Portuguese blog called Twitter Portugal and on an article today he has posted about using another search query in Google to produce results and could prove to be more effective in finding interesting people on twitter that you can connect with. Alexandres personal blog is in English and worth checking out.

Twitter Location search in Google

Open Google and in the search bar paste this query:

site:twitter.com/* location+**yourlocation**

In the string above replace the red text with the location where you want to locate people, say for example, your local town or area so the string would look like this:

site:twitter.com/* location+London

The results that come back are the listings Google has for twitter people who have added their profile location aas London hence the reference in the string to the word “location” plus “London”.

I have run a few tests to see how this breaks down and it works for street names as well. Check this out.

site:twitter.com/* location+Wall Street

Using Twitter location search in Google:

Something I came across was also the use of locations that have two or more words as their name, like New York, that produced a different set of results on each search when the search is performed with and without a space between the words “New” and “York” like the examples below:

site:twitter.com/* location+New York

site:twitter.com/* location+NewYork

As you can see the results are quite different and Google does suggest that you try New York as the spelling when the second search is performed. This now has me thinking about how these results are populated in order of rank as the New York Times has top position on the location search. Interesting maybe… Need to think about this a little more before I draw any conclusions.

Twitter Biography search in Google

Another variation on the search which could prove to be even more interesting is how to search peoples twitter biography profiles with Google. The search string works in the same manner as the one above but we replace the word location with Bio and the term with something related to the bio like so:

site:twitter.com/* bio+**information we wish to find in someones bio**

This means we can insert a keyword or phrase instead of the red text above to search through twitter users bios and hopefully find someone really interesting to connect with so it could be any of the searches below:

site:twitter.com/* bio+doctor

site:twitter.com/* bio+art museum

site:twitter.com/* bio+blogger

Quite honestly the possibilities are endless and one important point this illustrates is how you need to consider your bio in twitter as this search is used in various other formats and applications to produce results. Does your Bio reflect you accurately? Maybe its time to revise it a little!

Let me know what type of searches you do and how the results work out for you!

**Update.

Variation on using Google search to find interesting twitter users

Alexandre just replied to a comment I left on his site directing me to another way of using the searches above to drill down and find really specific people you would love to meet on twitter by Mike Mirrell. The method he describes seem to have much more specific and targeted results than than above.

I have quoted Mikes post on Using Google to Twitter Tweeple as I reckon its only fair he gets recognition for posting this cool information. Thanks Mike really cool stuff.

Using Google to Find Twitter Tweeple

I came across a neat tip on searching for specific folks to follow on Twitter. Now there are applications such as Nearby Tweets and GeoTweet but this seemed much more effective to me. It basically leverages the Google search engine to search Twitter profiles. This tip leverages the google site search.

Here’s how it works:

1. Example: Say I want to search for marketers in the NYC area. This is what I would copy into Google.com

site:twitter.com intitle:”on twitter” “bio* * marketing” “location NYC”

This returned 8 pages of targeted results.

2. Example: If I would like to find recruiters in the Austin area I could use this search

site:twitter.com intitle:”on twitter” “bio* * recruiter” “location austin”

This returned 11 results.

From these examples, you can just play with the words behind bio and location to get different results. For example you could search for “PR” within “dallas”.

Hopefully you found this helpful enough to share with others.

- Back to makin’ bacon

If anyone has any more ideas or experiences with this form of searching let us know in the comments below, or if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask. Enjoy!