patrick salyer

Businesses Need to Clarify How They Use Social Data (via Social Media Today)

Sat, 22 Jun 2013 08:45:00 -0700

Social data is a sensitive issue for both businesses and consumers. As recently as December, we saw mass consumer backlash against Instagram because of the company’s poor communication about changes to its Terms of Service. And while most companies handle their customers’ social data responsibly, new survey data from my company, Gigya, shows that online businesses are not doing a good enough job of communicating how they use social data. For full disclosure, we’ve been focused on privacy issues for quite some time and recently launched a certification program for businesses use social data responsibly.

The study (full details can be found here) asked more than 2,600 18+ year-old U.S. consumers about how they view social login and how they think companies use their social data:

More than half (53%) of consumers have logged into an application or website using social login.
Of consumers who have opted not to use social login, 40% say it is because they do not know what will happen to their personal information, and 41% say they are unsure if the site or application would post or share without asking for permission.
Of that same group of consumers, 63% believe that businesses will sell their social data, 50% believe businesses will post to their social feeds without permission and 52% think sites will spam their social network friends when they login via social login.

These statistics indicate a major disconnect between how consumers think businesses will use social data and how those businesses really do use the information. For example, as mandated byFacebook’s Platform Policies, sites cannot sell user social data to third parties, and likewise, they cannot post to users’ social feeds without permission. When companies under or miscommunicate how they use their customers’ social data, they create consumer confusion and even suspicion about how sites access and use personal information. After all, social data, more than any other type of online consumer data, is personal. People get upset when they think a business will exploit their personal information based on changes in its user agreement.

While the consumer perception that businesses will do things like sell social data is largely incorrect, the onus is on businesses to change that viewpoint. It’s time to take transparency to a level that makes it completely obvious to users that their data will not be abused. When consumers grant your business access to their social profiles via technologies like social login, make it clear not just what data will be accessed but also make an explicit promise to users that their data will not be sold, their friends will not be spammed and that they didn’t just sign up for your company’s newsletter without knowing it.

In essence, promise your users that you’ll do the right thing by offering a “virtual handshake”, where users grant you access to their data in exchange for value (often personalization or ease-of-use) and transparency. Building and maintaining trust with customers is critical for any business, big or small, on or offline. It’s not just ethical to be transparent about how you will use your customers’ data – it’s good business.

Listening To Social Media Cues Doesn't Mean Ceding Control (via Forbes)

Sat, 22 Jun 2013 08:41:00 -0700

“A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is – it is what consumers tell each other it is.” - Scott Cook, co-founder, Intuit

“Our head of social media is the customer.” - Unknown spokesperson,McDonald’s

These social media adages are scary enough to give any CMO the chills. The lifeblood of online marketing before the Age of the Consumer has centered around control – of brand, user experience, messaging, conversations. Marketers have been told countless times over the last few years that social meant the end of control. You were told that no longer would your users linger on your carefully manicured website, absorbing your delicately crafted messaging as they click on products and articles. You were told that consumers now had the power, and, in some ways, that has become the reality. But that’s not the whole story. Social business has evolved to the point to where marketers are taking back their brands and, by using social infrastructure, they are reaching, understanding and influencing their customers like never before.

For some time, the prescription to the “social problem” for businesses has been to create a Facebook fan page, a corporate Twitter handle and, for the avant-garde, a Google+ and Pinterest page. While creating and managing social media profiles has become the norm for many big brands, data shows that posting content to marketing tools like Facebook pages does little to engender any significant level of engagement or other meaningful business metric. Furthermore, booting users from your company’s website to its Facebook page isn’t an optimal way of getting your users to engage with or stay connected to your brand.

This raises an important question: If consumers are deeply rooted in being social on the Web (a thesis widely accepted by analysts and industry observers and evident from the billions of active social networks users), how can companies respond in a way that provides both a social experience to those consumers and brand control to those very companies? While there is no social silver bullet to miraculously help brands navigate through new media, there is a powerful set of technologies that companies can employ to maintain control over their brands while catering to a social user-base: social infrastructure.

Social infrastructure is the technology that makes Web properties social. It’s the backbone of the social Web beyond the walls of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks. Anytime a user registers or logs into a website with his social ID, leaves a comment with his social ID, shares content from the site to his social network(s) or participates in a site’s gamification elements while leveraging his social profile – that is social infrastructure at work. This set of technologies mobilizes a user’s social identity and allows them to be truly social across the web. But aside from an improved user experience, social infrastructure delivers a critical element to marketers: control.

Control in this case refers to two distinct but interrelated concepts. First, by implementing social infrastructure and allowing your users to be social on your site, you can control what your users see – messages, content and even advertising. The alternative is to boot your users to Facebook where they are placed in a hyperactive circus of ads from other companies, sponsored posts and two constantly updating feeds displaying their friends’ activities across the social Web. This all-too-common scenario provides little control for a business trying to foster brand engagement. In fact, for marketers, it’s chaos.

The second way that social infrastructure gives marketers control is in the incredibly valuable sets of data that your social users bring to your site. When a customer comes to your site and signs in via social login, for example, a cordial exchange occurs. He is able to register and login to your site quickly without needing to create a new set of credentials and is able to seamlessly share and comment on and otherwise interact with your site’s content using his social profile. In return, you, the marketer, gain permission-based access to his social profile information, building a lasting relationship with the user. This data set is quite literally the most extensive and valuable assortment of user information available. When authenticating via social login, the user passes dozens of data fields to you including: name, email, birthdate, hometown, relationship status, political views, interests, activities, work history, religious views and education level. It’s the holy grail of customer information which is easily attainable in an aboveboard and responsible way.

The exchange that takes place when a user logs into your site via social login is essentially a “virtual handshake” where customers receive value from a faster login process and the ability to interact with content, and you, the marketer, gain permission-based access to customers’ social profile data.

There is little debate that social networks have changed consumer behavior and expectation. Big brands can no longer get away with unresponsive customer service, lackadaisical content and poor quality products. Customers now have a voice and they’re not afraid to shout their cacophonous opinions across any number of social platforms for the world to see. But rather than cowering in fear at the new uninhibited consumer or simply trying to manage the online conversations that take place outside of your business’s Web properties, you can embrace technologies that help you maintain control of your brand and understand your customers like never before.

How to Choose the Right Social Marketing Platform (via Mashable)

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 21:58:11 -0700

While much of the tech and financial world has been focused on Facebook’s post-IPO performance, something else has happened that is starting to define the social marketplace. Savvy firms like Salesforce.com and Oracle have strategically gobbled up some of the top social vendors. These acquisitions signify that social business has become big business. The formulation of meaningful social categories is also taking shape, and marketers — particularly CMOs — should take note as they look to gain real ROI from social.

The best way to determine what social categories and tools you company should utilize is to look at what companies like Salesforce.com and Oracle are investing in. Both companies have identified and invested in three main categories of social technology: social media management, social media monitoring, and social infrastructure. By examining what these categories look like, and what technologies matter, you can determine where to focus your business resources.

Social Media Management Platforms

Social media management platforms have become critical components of every CMO’s off-site strategy. Companies like Buddy Media, Vitrue, Wildfire, and ThisMoment all offer a variety of tools that allow you to manage multiple social channels and create specialized campaigns and pages to reach users on Facebook,Twitter, and LinkedIn. These companies have enjoyed success largely because they enhance existing social networks with brand engagement tools like contests, quizzes, polls, and branded content.

These technologies help you manage your brand’s Facebook and Twitter pages, provide different social applications, and can even help you with advertising within Facebook. The sheer number of these types of companies along with the prominent types of clients using their platforms (Coca Cola, L’Oreal, HP, McDonald’s, etc.) shows the need for off-site social marketing technologies.

Social Media Monitoring Platforms

Just as businesses have taken to technologies that help them speak to their users, they also understand the need to listen. To mitigate the challenges of trying to listen to and understand what social users say about brands, a number of social listening platforms have emerged in the last few years.

In essence, these companies help businesses make sense of online brand-relevant conversations. Players like Radian6 (now a Salesforce.com company) took an early lead in this marketplace by offering a hybrid self-serve/automated SaaS product that scoured public conversations across the social web while offering robust analytics to help marketers measure conversation by sentiment and demographic data. While other companies like Collective Intellect and Sysomos — both of which were acquired — have slightly different takes on social listening. Still, they all offer robust sets of tools that help you understand what customers and users are saying about your business.

Social Infrastructure

While social marketing and social listening platforms give brands the tools to reach users on social networks, users don’t just want to be social on social networks anymore. Now users expect a social experience wherever they go, and businesses are reconfiguring their web properties to meet consumer demand. Look at any major media site — The Huffington Post, ABC.com, CBS.com — or a number of brand and ecommerce sites — Pepsi, Microsoft, Wal-mart and the NFL — and you’ll see social network hooks in almost every piece of content. That’s social infrastructure, and it’s critical to keeping users engaged and to building relationships with them when they visit your web properties.

Social infrastructure companies like BazaarVoice, Mass Relevance, and others offer a number of tools designed to bring social experiences to websites. Products like social login, sharing, comments, and activity feeds are designed to give users a social experience while providing sites permission-based access to users’ social data. In turn, you can use this data to offer those users a more personalized experience and market to them by accessing traits like users’ interests, activities, and relationship statuses. It’s essentially a virtual handshake where users grant you access to certain types of data and, in turn, your business agrees to responsibly use the data to offer better deals, content, and products to the users.

The social web has become a tricky amalgam of different vendors trying to carve out niches to call their own. Understandably, this has resulted in a fair bit of confusion for marketers trying to decide what types of technologies and products they must leverage to reach social users. But, it doesn’t need to be so complicated. If you’re a marketer, the questions you must ask yourself are: how do I reach and understand users when they’re on social networks and how do I relate those users when they’re on my site? The goals you must establish should center on how well this technology facilitates brand engagement, and whether it helps users consume your content or products.

5 Ways Spotify Is Pioneering the Hyper-Social Business Model (via Mashable)

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 04:27:59 -0700

Spotify has experienced meteoric growth since integrating with the new Facebook Open Graph in September. It is quickly becoming the leader in streaming music, an already crowded category.

Spotify’s growth and its deep connection to Facebook are not coincidental either. In fact, the company’s success is due in large part to its deep Facebook integration and the incredibly balanced user experience it offers.

Below you’ll find a list of reasons why Spotify gets the Open Graph 2.0 right, and how the company has created such an incredible user experience.

1. Unparalleled Facebook Integration

In the past few months, our Facebook tickers and news feeds have been full of updates telling us what our friends are listening to. Spotify’s integration into the ticker and news feed is sleek, seamless and sticky. But that’s really just the beginning of what makes Spotify so unique and so engaging.

After I see what my friends are listening to, I click on the song, but I’m not directed to Amazon.com to purchase the song or to Pandora.com to listen to similar artists. Rather, as soon as I decide to listen to my friend’s song, the socially-integrated Spotify app opens right on my desktop.

Spotify’s social integration is tight; users transition between Facebook and Spotify smoothly. As soon as a user links Spotify to his Facebook account, his friends’ listening activities (alongside their Facebook profile photos) are featured prominently right on the app. You can literally drag and drop music to share with a friend. Then, the song lands in your friend’s Spotify inbox via an in-app notification. It’s truly quintessential frictionless sharing.

2. Sharing vs. Privacy

Spotify also balances its broadcast sharing model with an easy way to opt-out. As privacy issues continue to dominate the discussion on social networks, Spotify is not only able to cater to hyper-social users (those who love to share music both actively and passively), but also to those who would rather not share at all.

Users can choose what information they want to share with their friends and, if desired, not share their listening activities at all. Although Spotify users are already socially inclined, when they are given controls — when they know how to easily turn the fire hose on and off — they feel even more comfortable sharing.

3. Apps Within an App

Social is the key to web personalization. Specifically, Spotify opened its platform to allow third-party applications to cater to users’ musical tastes even more.

Songkick, one of the apps within Spotify, reviews your playlists, listening habits and location to create a customized calendar of shows in your area, and even provides links to purchase tickets. Of course, the app could be even better by allowing purchase directly in the UI, but still, it does a very snappy job of personalizing music event calendars.

4. Walking the Tightrope

Ultimately, what makes Spotify so impressive is its balance between the on-Facebook and off-Facebook experiences, not to mention, its balance between sharing and privacy. Unlike music apps of the past (remember iLike for Facebook?) and the present (anyone using Google Music?), Spotify delicately achieves this balance by fully utilizing Facebook’s new capabilities, while still largely controlling the user experience and monetizing along the way.

As our tickers and news feeds become flooded with passive shares, it’s going to be fascinating to see which apps gain adoption and which fall flat. I predict the businesses that follow Spotify’s balanced approach will truly stand out. Conversely, those that neglect to carefully and strategically deploy the new Open Graph may find their apps under-utilized.

5. From Social to Hyper-Social

The new Facebook Open Graph plants the seeds for challenging the old guard. Just as the on-demand model helped companies like Netflix and Salesforce.com catapult ahead of stagnant companies like Blockbuster and Siebal Systems, respectively, so too could these hyper-social technologies help innovative businesses surpass their more inflexible competitors.

Millions of businesses have slapped the obligatory Facebook Like button on their web properties, and have subsequently wiped their hands of social. On the other hand, many forward-thinking businesses, ranging from services like Spotify to brands like Pepsi, seem to understand that “being social” means embracing and strategically applying new technologies that spread their content, products and brands.

Companies that take this approach have a tremendous opportunity to grow their user bases and produce tangible benefits from social. Those businesses that shouted from the rooftops about their social prowess after creating Facebook fan pages and adding Like buttons to their properties need to wake up to the new reality. The next generation of social technology, including the Facebook Open Graph 2.0, is changing the rules for engagement all over again. It’s time for businesses to decide: Either get hyper-social like Spotify, or get left behind.

How Facebook’s New Features Will Affect Digital Marketers (via Mashable)

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 08:15:10 -0700

With Facebook’s major changes set to roll out this week, little thought has been given to answering how Timeline and the revamped Open Graph will affect our interaction with rest of the web, and how websites stand to benefit. I believe that weaving Facebook even deeper into websites is going to yield a positive experience for consumers and sites alike. Here’s why.

Contextual Sharing

One of the notable features of the enhanced Open Graph is contextual sharing. For users, the benefit is obvious — it enables much more than just “liking” a piece of content. Now, a user can share that he or she “read” Catching Fire or that he or she “listened to” Nirvana. “Liking” an article, video or photo has thus far limited users, forcing them to show tacit approval (within the context of one-click reactions) for something that they may not necessarily find desirable.

With contextual sharing, users will no longer be boxed-in by expressing one emotional reaction. For marketers, this offers major benefits for on-site engagement and syndication.

Auto-Sharing

One of the other share features that Facebook unveiled is “frictionless sharing,” which allows sites to share any content a user reads or interacts with directly to his Facebook Ticker. It’s important to point out that the user must authorize the site to turn on this sharing functionality much in the same way that sites have already needed to allow users to explicitly authenticate. However, by enabling sharing and placing objects on a user’s Timeline, Facebook is undertaking an enormous and important process: documenting web activity.

While some end-users may cringe at the thought of their entire digital lives being “Facebooked,” this approach to broadcasting web activity appeals to its younger, most active user-base — a group that seems to care about “show and tell” even more than it does about privacy. Teens and young adults grew up with Facebook, and the transition from one- or two-click sharing to no-click sharing won’t be as uncomfortable.

The Business Upside: Data and Traffic

Getting users to interact with Facebook’s updated features for websites is an advantage in itself, but there are other, more concrete ways the revamped Facebook features will help businesses. As the user experience becomes more personal and engaging, Facebook’s functionality on websites will ultimately provide those sites with an even deeper look into whom their visitors are. This marriage of social data and on-site activity can be applied for a number of ROI-driven activities, such as hyper-specific ad targeting, content and product recommendations, and driving inventory decisions.

Just as importantly, the frictionless sharing features could be a huge boon for sites as measured by the oldest and most valuable metric on the Internet: referral traffic. By allowing auto-sharing for nearly any activity on a site, users will be able to push even more content to the News Feed, Ticker and Timeline, generating more exposure and click backs to sites.

Discovery: Now a Two-Way Street

For years, the web was about search — that is, people using search engines to find specific things online. Now, the web is shifting toward discovery — users are increasingly letting content find them via social networks. This trend actually started a few years ago with a number of sites seeing social networks drive more referral traffic than search engines. With Facebook’s new features, I think we’ll see this trend turn into a basic tenet of web optimization, as sites will soon be able to learn so much more about their users and offer targeted, shareable content that brings in more referral traffic.

Today, businesses spend millions of dollars optimizing for Google searches, trying to get found. But as social becomes a larger traffic driver, and as Facebook and other social networks continue to enable content discovery, those businesses will need to offer interactive, sharable content in order to stay relevant. Those businesses that understand how Facebook is enabling bilateral relationships between sites and users will get found, gain traffic and increase on-site engagement. Those businesses relying on search — and ignoring Facebook’s bold innovations — may soon stop getting found at all.

HOW TO: Personalize Your Marketing With Social Data

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 19:09:00 -0700

HOW TO: Personalize Your Marketing With Social Data:

By-line article on Mashable reflecting my thoughts on the future importance of social data.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1768213/game-mechanics-gamification-gigya

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:46:00 -0700

http://www.fastcompany.com/1768213/game-mechanics-gamification-gigya:

My thoughts on the future of gamification.

time management - a simple philosophy

Sun, 04 Apr 2010 16:20:16 -0700

Back in high school I developed a philosophy about how I spent my time, and I actually still find it relevant today. This became a super important topic for me, because I was involved in a number of activities, each trying to pull me in one direction or another. Of course, academics placed a huge demand on my time. This could have easily taken all of my time then. Then, there were sports. Not just one sports, but 2. Plus, basketball didn’t just include my high school coach, but my club coach. And each coach wanted you to spend a certain amount of time training, etc. Also, there was the extracurriculars like academic decathlon. There was the volunteer work. There was also church. And, you can’t forget your friends that want and expect you to be hanging out all the time.

Each one of these activities - academics, sports, volunteer, extra-curriculars, church, friends, etc - were requesting and demanding an increased amount of time. This was difficult for me as I didn’t want to disappoint any individual and I wanted to excel at everything. In short, I really wanted the ability to do it all. Thinking back, I actually became frustrated with the leaders of some of these activities for asking so much of my time.

In time, I began putting it all into perspective. I began realizing that it was the job of the people that ran these various activities to demand as much as possible out of me. In fact, I should likely be thanking them for demanding so much, as this instilled a pursuit of excellence. I suddenly realized it was my job to set out with a worldview, an ultimate set of goals, that would guide how I would spend my time. These goals would help me make the decisions on how I spent my time each day. As long as I was making decisions consciously, with those goals in mind, than I shouldn’t be overly concerned with not meeting the expectations of the various projects that I’m involved with.

Since High School, I still find that general concept to ring true. As I moved into college, and now working life, I find the demands as great as ever, and the need to put those demands into a perspective of what I’m trying to accomplish.

Passion for the job

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:34:20 -0700

A friend has recently been considering switching jobs. Something that is weighing into the decision is a concern that the potential opportunity, while better from a day to day lifestyle, may not be the ideal job he is passionate about.

It’s got me thinking quite a bit. In general, I think today we all have a luxury (it’s a good thing) to worry about finding work you are passionate about and work that would be considered prestigious and successful. This is a new thing. Back for my grandparents and previous generations, work meant feeding their family. Work decisions really weren’t decisions at all. I would venture to guess that work, in most cases, was as simple as figuring out whatever you could get paid for. Since education wasn’t so readily available, this probably meant doing whatever your parents did. Even today, there are hundreds of millions of people in developing countries without the luxury of any type of job choice.

It goes without saying the opportunity to find work you are passionate about, an opportunity awarded with increased education and the modern economy, is a good thing. But, as we are one of the first generations to worry about finding work we are passionate about, I believe that we are going to squirm a bit in our pursuit of this. No one tells you exactly how to accomplish this, but I believe many in my generation in the US feel the need to have it in their work. Until the world comes up with an instruction manual, I think it may be worth keeping in mind that it’s a luxury to be able to find successful work, that we are passionate about. Although, when making job decisions, without the manual to help us figure it out it sure doesn’t feel that way.

Emotional Labor: Quite possibly the most under-rated professional tool today

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:14:53 -0700

I’m currently in the process of reading Seth Godin’s “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable”. One of the more thought provoking concepts that Seth addresses is the concept called Emotional Labor. Emotional Labor includes the interactions between individuals, including co-workers, clients, superiors, etc. Emotional Labor can involve connecting with others, flashing a smile, taking initiative, showing charisma, solving a problem.

It’s important that emotional labor isn’t a concept that takes physical skills. What it does take is a ton of effort. It’s very tiring for almost everyone.

Because it takes so much effort, and it’s not a hard skill (especially things like connecting with others, charisma, asking questions, smiling), nearly everyone I know just forgets it altogether. It’s easy to think it doesn’t help perform day to day aspects of a job, and because it’s tiring, pass on it altogether.

But emotional labor is a real low-hanging fruit. I believe that very few individuals - either at home or work - are really mastering this skill. As Seth points out, as it becomes almost impossible to produce a cheaper widget in the era of Wal-Mart & Amazon, emotional labor may be the only way to differentiate.

How does one improve in this area? I’d suggest to begin to think about those in your own life that do a good job at this and think about what they are doing. You should have 1 or 2 folks, past or present, that you can think of. I can think of a friend in college that I’d get lunch with once in a while. He brought so much energy into those conversations, so much engagement. Always asking questions, smiling, eye contact, not checking the phone. We grew closer because his approach to our conversations required interaction, intimacy, and intellectuality. I left those conversations feeling filled with life, recharged. I’ve got another friend who, when he shows up, brings so much charisma into a room it comes to life. There is an energy he brings with his positive attitude, jokes, overall energy.

In both these examples, there is a good amount of intention - questions, attitude, facial expressions, presence. My guess is it’s not easy to bring that much energy into conversations or charisma into a room, but they’ve realized it’s worth the effort for them. And it’s under their control.

These are things I’m going to begin thinking more about in my own personal and professional life. Especially how can I encourage those I manage to bring emotional labor into our client relationships to create a competitive advantage.

free market is a scary thing

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 16:30:56 -0700

As everyone probably knows by now, there are some serious issues with our financial system right now. It seems to me that a series of investment firms took some big risks on loans that wouldn’t get paid back because they are too risky. Even further, a series of home owners bought homes they couldn’t afford and took these loans. Now, the market is correcting itself, and some fear is settling in, and we are all paying for it.

Let me give a quick overview of the week. Monday, the S&P 500 dropped about 4%. It stayed steady for Tues, so I thought the worst was over. Than on Wed., it dropped another 5%. Geez. Things weren’t good. I started reconsidering my investment strategy, for good reason. The fed stepped in, agreeing to pour in billions of tax payer dollars and on Thursday the market rose again.

If the fed stood by, and let the market continue to fall, the truth of the matter is the investment firms & defaulted mortgage holders wouldn’t have been the only ones that would have suffered. It would have been all the money I have in stocks. So, I am relieved they did it. But, should we be taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again? The problem with that is that it means regulation, and regulation will probably hurt the economy and lead to lower returns.

The free market is a scary thing. It’s great in that I can get great returns on my investments when all is going well. But when things sour, I can pay for others mistakes.

It will be interesting to see if we will be entering a new phase in the market, when it is more regulated. And, it will be interesting to see if we can have our cake and eat it too. I hope so.