Reblogged from Successful Workplace:

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The following is a guest post by Toby Beresford. Toby is founder of Leaderboarded.com a tool to create multi-variable leaderboards from both business and social data. He can be reached at @tobyberesford.

At the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, a smaller British fleet routed a larger  French one, destroying 22 French ships without a single British vessel being lost.

Read more… 702 more words

1. Social media is a fad, we can safely ignore it.
2. Social media is here to stay
3. I have a personal social media presence
4. I have a company social media presence
5. I listen in on social media
6. I create content on social media
7. I  engage in two way conversations on social media
8. I  engage in conversations with my customers on social media
9. I have properties that encourage customers to communicate with each other on social media (eg. a community forum, a Facebook game)
10. I triage my engagement with my customers based on how influential they are on social media
11. I triage my engagement with customers based on how important they are to my business
12. I let customers know their ‘importance score’ for my business and show them how to improve it
13. I offer perks to my customers based on their  score
14. I have directly driven sales transactions from social media engagement
15. My customers do my selling for me

I’d be interested to know!

Also, have I missed anything from the scale? Let me know

I’ll share them here too as they were quite well received:

3 Key Trends

Extension – we are no longer seeing our online personas as ‘avatars’ – things that are not us but instead as ‘extensions’ – digital extensions of our true selves. If we engage only the physical side of people we are not engaging the whole person. That’s why event leaderboards are important.

Tribes – our identities are increasingly linked to tribes rather than traditional identities of geography and nationhood. Listen to Seth Godin’s TED talk.

Herds – as the influence of experts, leaders and authority figures diminishes so we look instead to social proof and the movement of others in the herd to decide how to behave. Again another reason for the rising popularity of leaderboards – you can now create your own via my app leaderboarded.

4 Key Terms

Social Architecture – this is all about how you set up your social presences balancing management cost versus delivering relevance to the customer – do you have a brand page for every product, category, in every territory and language? that could get tricky to manage, especially if you add multiple channels – Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest….

Social Data – how do you tap into the social data stream in such a way that it can trigger targeted, context sensitive, transactional offers to your customers. My classic example of this is the girl who has signed up for pizza offers, when she posts on her social channel – “wow what a great film that was, Skyfall rocks” – can the pizza company respond – hey why not celebrate with a trip to our pizza restaurant, here’s some vouchers valid for tonight only.  You need lots of clever lifting at the backend to make this work at industrial scale.

Social Design – this is a term popularised by the Facebook team – we need to think about how our product or service “adds” to a user’s expression of themselves online. What does it mean to my friends if I am a Marmite fan? What does it say about me if I join the 2nd circle of the Marmarati?

Social Triage – how does the social media profiles of our customers change how we behave towards them. Cathay Pacific offers people with Klout scores over 40 a chance to sit in their business lounge. But should we all rely on a standard influence score – surely it would be better if each company had its own influence score for customers. Contact me now if you want more info on how to do this for your business as I am working on a productised solution.

• ABC_Help
• ABC_CustomerService
• ABC_CustomerSupport
• ABC_Service
• ABC_Support
• ABC_Cares
• Ask_ABC
• ABC_CustomerCare
• ABC_Heroes

Any others? Add them in the comments below

- social is a new layer on the whole internet – across the world knowing what your friends think matters more to people than knowing what experts think

- tech companies tend to become monopolies (look at Microsoft and Google) due to network effects

- With over a billion users Facebook owns the majority share of the social layer across the world

So yeah there are things to sort out, like monetising verticals other than games, providing advertising opportunities on mobile devices, but these are no big deal, it’s just a question of getting the balance right.

Apart from games, Facebook has monetised so far around its product (display ads on the side for example) while keeping the core experience free. With products like sponsored stories (where you pay for your best stories to be spread even further) it monetises within its product.  If they can navigate the cultural issues right then they will do very well indeed.

I wouldn’t sell your Facebook shares just yet.

Interesting companies in this space include:

Nimble CRM – a sales led customer social profile data browsing tool (Social CRM / SCRM)

Leaderboarded – a customer-led social profile data collection tool (Social CRM + Gamification) (Disclosure: this is my tool)

Klout, Kred, PeerIndex – companies that calculate influence scores for social profiles

Gnip, Datasift – companies that enrich and resell social data

Who have I missed out? Let me know in the comments below.

Or come to one of my Social Data meetup.

Good to be back in Social.

Toby

I’m changing tack! To follow my continued interest in creating better communities, better teams and better ways of working together, I’m leaving the social media ocean, which has met many of the needs of individuals but has struggled to build collaboration and dependable communities.

So  as I head into new waters, I’d like to invite you to join me.  The new waters are:

The Sea of Meetings

We all have meetings and I guess we all feel they could be a bit more efficient.  I’m going to be focusing specifically on the structure of meetings: agendas, minutes and actions – helping people to get the meeting, this fundamental unit of team work, right. How can we use web technology to make meetings altogether better and more productive?

The blog for this is http://www.themeetingminutes.com – a web resource for anyone searching for advice on running great meetings. It features my own posts and also guest posts – so if you have a view of meetings that you’d like to share – ping me a mail (toby@pailz.com) – and I’ll send you a brief.

TheMeetingMinutes.com - meeting advice blog

The Big Game River

Games are everywhere, we play them everyday, we just don’t usually call them out as such. Whether it is ‘levelling up’ at work with a promotion or losing points on your driving licence, the mechanics of gameplay are often used.  Over the next few years, as a new generation of workers join the workplace, those brought up with the benefits of game playing, will expect those same benefits when applied to work. Common game benefits such as transparency of how to win (which points make prizes) and visibility of progress and where you stand versus colleagues (leaderboard) will become standard.

I’m launching a blog to track and analyse this change – called ‘Gamification Of Work‘ – do subscribe and keep track on the Game Layer at the top of the world….

And social?

I’m afraid that means the end of blogging at The Social Bazaar – the social layer is built, it is now widely understood, now on to build the game layer…  join me

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More petals mean more social engagement [Photo credit: The Big Quack via Flickr

Indeed, one of the participants was a full time social game designer and the session prompted him to fix a negative daily loop on his application today!

A key question that came up, which is worth discussing here in the blog, is what percentage of acquistions are likely to come from the viral engagement channels (the viral petals in our model) versus from the initial discovery (the stem).

This relates to the virality of the app, as measured by the viral coefficient (the number of earned users you get relative to each paid user). Obviously benchmarks vary wildly depending on the application type but I would say that if you see 30% uplift (a viral coefficient of 0.3) on your initial discovery then you are doing well. For a product to ‘go viral’ – i.e. to spread of its own accord you would need to see a viral uplift of at least 100% – for each person you add they bring in at least one more.

William Hague responds to my request for information on our Libyan strategy...

Yes, it’s end-of-the-week bug-bear time. Today I’m going to express a slight irritation over the handling of unread flags for social media inboxes by my various smart devices.

Let’s take the example of a simple twitter @ response. In this case one I received from William Hague (good in itself) to a simple question I posed to him about Libya on twitter (‘Why are we there?’) during a demonstration of the power of social media. I saw his response appear on my Blackberry and I retweeted it proudly. That all went well.

However, what is less satisfactory, is that I was also notified about this tweet mention on my android phone (ok so maybe I’m on odd in having two phones) despite already having ‘read’ it on my blackberry. I also was notified when I opened my Ipad by the twitter app that sits on there.

I don’t want to have to read things twice or even three times to flag that I read it. It’s a complete waste of time.

The problem is that the unread / read flag (as so often used by email inboxes) is not shared by the API or is not handled correctly by the various client software.

This isn’t a problem limited to Twitter – I get frustrated having to ‘mark as read’ LinkedIn emails online that I’ve responded to via my phone, via email or on the Ipad, it’s also a problem with Facebook messages and notifications – the Facebook for blackberry app currently shows 23 unread messages yet when I look online I’m all up to date.

It’s a problem that unless addressed is only set to get worse as we get more platforms and more devices – I like the convenience of accessing social messages from various devices but this is an issue I just wish would go away.

So, if you’re implementing a social media platform then please make sure the unread/read flag is part of your messaging API. If you’re implementing a social media client application then make sure you take account of the unread/read flag (thank you Flipboard who are quite good at this!) and you’ll make the information stream a better, less frustrating place to be.

End of bug-bear. Have a great Royal Wedding weekend!

Facebook Credits: could they be a new global currency?

Facebook Commerce is coming, haven’t you heard?  Doing business with your customers via Facebook is the next big thing. So, if you’re lagging behind in this space, what should you do to get ready?

1. Build a fan base

Creating a Facebook fan page (or 100 fan pages) creates you a beachhead on the world’s favourite social network and an owned audience channel to engage with your fans for as long as they ‘like’ you.  Companies like Syncapse [Disclosure: where I work] or any of the Facebook Preferred Developer Consultants will help.

2. Integrate social plugins to your website

Take a look at The Huffington Post - note how it uses your Facebook identity to provide you a personalised experience – the news as recommended by your friends. Go and do likewise.

3. Create a Facebook application so you have permission to message your Facebook fans via email.

A Facebook application, whether a competition, a game or utility, will give you access to the social data you’re going to need to be successful – at minimum it’s a way to send a push message to your customers via email.

4. Understand Facebook Credits 

Facebook Credits could be the global currency of the future – but every transaction will cost you 30%? Seems a crazy percentage? Well it’s for real, you’d better look at your your financial model in light of this. Credits are only accepted for virtual goods at present but understanding why they are worth 30% is perhaps your first port of call.

5. Start trialling today

Take one part of your business and start trialling some aspect of Facebook commerce – there are off the shelf tools to try, as you can see from my own Facebook shop.  The only thing is clear, doing nothing and just ‘listening’ as so many companies seem to be doing, is no longer an option.