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10 Reasons to Use Foursquare Explore for Personalized Local Searches (via Search Engine Watch)

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:16:00 -0800

Foursquare recently announced "Explore", their new web-based tool that takes geosocial and local search to a new level. Check out these enticing perks that come along with the new features.

Beyond mobile check-ins for badges and mayorship battles, Foursquare Explore now leverages this data in a useful fashion as a web-based personalized search engine.

Consider for a moment that you're looking for a local place to visit for shopping, dining, nightlife, or recreation... What thoughts come to mind?

Where have or haven't I been before?

What places are popular?

What places would my friends or colleagues suggest?

What places have deals or specials?

What does the place look like?

What should I try when I get there?

Regardless of if we're searching online, we all contemplate some of these questions. Channeling this thought process into a tool seems to be a brilliant idea. Behold, Foursquare Explore is here!

The process is simple:

Login or create an account at Foursquare.com

If you just created an account, add friends from Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, or Yahoo Mail.

Click Explore to begin your local search:

Results can be filtered by related check-in data and the interactive map allows you to easily zoom and drag the map accordingly. The iconography for location types helps to visually spot places you may be seeking.

Top 10 Reasons to Check Out "Foursquare Explore"

Flexibility - From your smartphone, tablet, or web browser, searching can easily be done by keyword or category and then be filtered to personalize results by location.

Specificity - Specific searches for things like "tiramisu" and "wine list", adjectives like "romantic" and "delicious", or time-significant keywords like "Friday" or "summer" work great because tips and lists are indexed.

Retained Privacy - Even if you don't personally like to do mobile check-ins, you can benefit from your friends' check-ins, tips, and lists along with 1.5 billion more from the Foursquare community.

Outing Ideas - Easily "save" places to visit later if you come across enticing tips or specials, and mark them "done" to remove them from your list.

Money Savings - Current local "coupons" and deals are easy to find! Just filter results by places that "have Foursquare specials."

Popularity - Displayed check-in counts help to identify hot spot destinations you'll likely enjoy. If there's a high number of unique check-ins by friends, that could also indicate a higher chance of bumping into a friend at the destination.

Travel Tips - Search for places proximate to any worldwide location, and Foursquare will suggest personalized "top picks" based on check-ins in your home town.

Adventures - Confidently find and try out new places that you "haven't been to yet" by scanning tips from places your "friends have been to" or by using Browse Categories > Top Picks for popular results.

Recovered Memories - Perhaps you checked into a place you visited outside of town two years ago, but you can't remember the name. If you roughly remember the location, you can search by places you "have been to" and easily be able to find it again.

Friendships - Grow relationships by learning what places you may unexpectedly have in common with your Foursquare acquaintances and friends.

Geosocial SEO Action List

If you have a public location you want users visit, consider planning a strategy to acquire visits from Foursquare Explore.

Create or claim your Foursquare location if you haven't already.

Regularly review check-in comments and tips to see what users are saying. (Scan for sentiments, adjectives, or long-tail specific query opportunities.)

Define a strategy to get more check-ins, photos and tips.

Use a QR code at entries for check-ins or exits for encouraging tip submission. (Be sure to follow QR conversion best practices.)

Identify photo opportunity areas and promote them with Foursquare ads. (i.e. menus, check-out counters, waiting areas, etc.)

Mention being featured in cool Foursquare lists as social proof and inspiration for others to list you.

Include sentiments, adjectives, and other targeted Foursquare SEO keywords with your ads, especially on-site! (Quality check-in comments can work great as testimonials.)

What Do You Think?

A local search tool that includes personalized tips from friends, visit history for you and your friends, and current coupons/specials definitely presents more value than merely earning a badge or mayorship.

Although Foursquare has been known for their mobile app, do you think this new utility will help evolve them into a mainstream application? Please share your thoughts in the comments. If you're tempted to check out Foursquare Explore be sure to share this post!
Register now for SES London 2012, the Leading Search & Social Marketing Event, taking place 20-24 February, 2012. SES Conference & Expo features presentations and panel discussions that cover all aspects of search engine-related promotion. Hurry, early bird rate expires February 3!

via searchenginewatch.com

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The Overnight Success Of A Social Media Cynic (via Social Media Explorer)

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 10:14:00 -0800

Bob Hoffman is one of those guys you love and hate all in the same breath. At least he is for me. Longtime author of the amazingly thought-provoking blog The Ad Contrarian, Hoffman bemoans bad advertising, berates ad industry idiosyncrasies, but also spends an awful lot of time bashing social media.

I had the honor (though at times I’ve questioned that label) of serving on a panel discussion with Bob once. It was at an advertising conference a few years back. I recall him trying to call bullshit on social media as a whole and me throwing it back at him as best I could coming from a relative neophyte in the marketing world.

(Bob is old. He’s run his own ad agency for 20 years. He’s so old he only has one job listed on his LinkedIn profile. We’re not sure if it’s because he never held one or that he forgot what came before he owned his own agency.)

Whether or not I won him over that day, I’ve read almost every word he’s written on his blog since. The guy is flat brilliant. And he calls a spade a spade. I guess we’re cut from similar cloth. (Though unlike his, mine was probably produced using machines that ran on electricity rather than burrows.)

As he is apt to do, Bob made a most important point about social media recently with his post, “My Overnight Success In Social Media.” In it, he explained how he produced the 2nd best-selling advertising eBook on Amazon in a span of just 18 hours. I wanted to share with you how he became such an “overnight success” to help illustrate a point, but also to let you know you should probably buy the book. I’ve read it. It’s awesome.

Here’s how he did it, quoting from the list he blogged that day:

First I wrote and published a book called The Ad Contrarian. This took a couple of years.

Next I started a blog called The Ad Contrarian.

Then I spent virtually every Saturday morning for five years roughing out ideas for Ad Contrarian blog posts.

For almost five years I spent at least two hours a day — usually between 3 and 5 am — writing my blog.

I also spent at least an hour every day scouring online and offline sources for blog post ideas.

I wrote several articles for trade publications sticking assiduously to my “Ad Contrarian” POV.

As a result, I developed a nice body of subscribers for my blog. I try to keep it fresh, entertaining, and controversial to attract non-subscribers every day.

Although I have several thousand Twitter followers, I act to maintain credibility by only tweeting about the blog when there is something I believe is unusually interesting in it.

To develop credibility among my readers, I have never used my blog to promote my agency.

In order to advance The Ad Contrarian I have traveled frequently to do speaking engagements and never accepted money.

Every person or company that has achieved some case study of success in social media has a similar story. If they don’t, then they’ve done something unscrupulous to invent their success that we probably wouldn’t recommend.

Not a single person I’ve talked to about social media marketing in the last five years isn’t looking for an easy button. The problem is that there’s not one. You will have to work at it. You will have to build an audience. You will have to hone your craft of communicating through these channels. You will have to rinse and repeat. And it still may not be the astounding success you were hoping for.

But not a bit of that isn’t true for other communications channels. Sure, you can throw a lot of money at television advertisements (or other channels, too) and drive numbers in the short term. But you’re never going to achieve the kind of success that grabs people, sinks your brand into their consciences and gives you long-term stability without putting in the hours, doing the dance and getting the work done.

Stop looking for the easy button. That and other flashes of brilliance can be found in 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising by Bob Hoffman. You should buy it (it’s $0.99 for chrissakes). While you’re at it, go subscribe to his blog, too. For you social media enthusiasts, it’ll piss you off more often than not, but it will make you think and, frankly, that’s a good thing.

And if you want something a bit more direct about building a social media strategy, there’s a book for that, too.

NOTE: None of the links here are affiliate links.
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via socialmediaexplorer.com

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They Did It: Google Personalizes Search & It Is Not Evil (via rww)

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:51:00 -0800

Google has "shipped the Google part" of Google+, and everything went better than expected. Today, Google launches Personal Results, Profiles in Search, and People and Pages, new features of its core search product that mark the real beginning of Google's social search era. Google search now has two modes: global and personalized. Personal search results show content from your Google+ network, and global search results appear as though you're logged out of Google+.

If you're like me, you've dreaded this day. Just last week, I wrote that Google+ was going to mess up the Internet by turning Web search into a popularity contest. But the new Google unveiled today leaves the user in control. "Search, plus Your World," Google has called it. It's two kinds of search, and they're separate. If you don't want Google+-flavored results, just switch to global mode. You can even turn off personalized search altogether.

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Personal Results

When you're in personal mode, you can now see your own stuff and stuff shared with you on Google+, even if it's not a public post. This includes photos, Google+ posts and shared links. Personal mode still shows global Web results, but it mixes those in with the social results Google thinks are most relevant. Personalized results are marked with a blue person icon.

At the top, where you're used to seeing the number of search results, you'll now see how many personal results and overall results turned up from your query. If you click the number of personal results, it will show you personal results only, taking out the global results. Flipping between personalized and global results takes one click. Both modes are available in Web search and image search.

Even when you search in personal mode, Google wants to show you the most relevant result at the top, even if its not from Google+. Prior to today's update, this wasn't happening reliably. The source of my concerns about Google+ was the prominence of Google+ results in search when outside Web results were more relevant. In the example slide Google showed to me, a search for "49ers" produced 49ers.com as the top result in personal mode, followed by Google+ posts.

The San Francisco 49ers do not have a Google+ page. I asked Google Fellow Ben Gomes whether that would be the top result if they did. He said the global result would be more relevant, and if the administrator of the Google+ page linked it with the website, that would be even more accurate. "It's an algorithm," Gomes reminded me. "It's not perfect, but we're tuning it to provide the most relevant results for our users."

If you don't buy it, or if a particular search doesn't personalize the way you'd like, just click the little Earth icon, and you get normal, global search results.

Of course, this mode will still privilege content posted to Google+ ahead of other social networks. Your friends' Google+ photos will take precedence here over their Instagram photos. But now that we can turn off personalization completely, it doesn't feel like Google is foisting Google+ content on us as much anymore.

Profiles In Search

Searching the Web for people is hard, especially for common names. Today's update pulls Google+ profiles into personal search along with content from around the Web associated with that person. This way, Google can use your social signals to figure out which Ben Smith is the one you know.

My top concern for this feature was that Google+ pages would always appear ahead of personal websites. If that happened, users would no longer be able to control what came up when others Googled them. Here's how Google talked me down: First of all, just switch to global mode and boom. No more social stuff.

But furthermore, these Google+ profile results aren't totally walled off to Google+ content. The link for the person is to Google+, but the snippet displays the most important content from that person below, whether it's on Google+ or not. This is what the links and authorship section of the Google+ profile are for. If you want your Twitter feed or your blog to be highlighted in Google searches for you, just add them to your Google+ profile, and they'll show up prominently.

People And Pages

The third feature of today's update is the most Google+-focused and least exciting, and you'll definitely notice it. On the right sidebar of some searches, there will be a "People and Pages on Google+" box. The example Google shows is a search for "music," which displays the Google+ pages for Britney Spears, Alicia Keys and Snoop Dogg in the right sidebar.

Presumably, some of the placements in this sidebar will be natural suggestions, like the 'Suggestions' box on Google+ itself. (Update: Google spokespeople have written in to clarify that it's currently all natural, algorithmic suggestions) But it's also ripe for paid promotions. This feels more like a potential ad spot than a user feature, but that's Google's business, after all. As long as Britney Spears can't pay to appear in my main search results, I'll tolerate sidebar ads as I always do on free Web services.

Security, Transparency and Control

"This is your data," Ben Gomes says. The new features bring an unprecedented amount of personal information in to Google search (when you're in personal mode), so today's update comes with new controls to set users' minds at ease. Signed-in users now get SSL search by default, as was announced in October. You also can block or un-circle unwanted Google+ users right from search.

But most importantly, for those who don't want any part of this social search business, users can turn it off temporarily and even opt out entirely. On every search, this toggle lets you switch between personalized and global results. There's no more inconvenient need to log out to see more objective search results.

And just as it has in the past with other conspicuous search features like Instant Search, Google allows users to deactivate social search entirely from search settings.

So, Is Google+ Still Going To Mess Up The Internet?

After my rant last week, I bet you're expecting me to quickly disable social search and breathe a sigh of relief. But I'm not. The toggle feature is something I did not expect. I thought Google was going to force us to use Google+ by making it a part of every search, as it was until today. But now, since it's so easy to flip back and forth, I can test to see which mode is more useful. I expect that social search will be better in some cases and worse in others. It's great to have the option.

I don't think Google is out of the woods. The instructions teaching users about these features are pretty clear, but people get set in their ways on the Web, and it's hard to change them. Some users freak out when Google changes even little, teeny things about search, and some Google+ overhauls of existing services have caused major backlashes.

But today's "Search, plus Your World" update actually softens the impact of Google+ on search. Google+ content is better integrated with outside stuff now, and, of course, it's optional, even for logged-in users. There are still problems with the state of Google search, but none of them are as dire as they were a week ago.

Now that Google users have control over the level of personalization, I don't think Google+ will mess up the Internet anymore. Social SEO will not take over, because natural search results still matter. My fear last week was that anyone who wanted to use Google would be forced to use Google+. Today's update shows good faith. Google has given its users control.

via readwriteweb.com

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iPad App Lets Kids Publish Physical Books (via mashable)

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:44:00 -0800

Scribble Press has three brick-and-mortar stores where more than 30,000 children have created their own books. Now, with the help of the iPad, it’s gearing up to become a global business.

The company has launched a free iPad app that digitizes the coloring and writing process usually completed in its marker-lined studios. Within the next week, Scribble will begin publishing board books — the kind with cardboard covers thick enough to chew on — created with the app.

“Most kids draw well before they write well,” says Scribble Press co-founder Anna Barber. “The iPad is a good medium for that, but the computer isn’t…The minute [the iPad] came out, I thought it was the perfect channel for what we were trying to do.”

There are plenty of websites that will publish a book you create, but dragging a mouse lacks the freedom of coloring, and scanning pages is a bother for mom and dad. Before the iPad, there wasn’t a good way to take Scribble Press’s “Build-A-Bear for books” experience outside of its stores.

Using the app, kids can draw and write freely. They can also choose from templates such as “I Love My Mom” or “My Babysitter is a Zombie” that give them a head start, and eventually, the company hopes to add themed worlds that kids can use in their books for an added cost.

The app itself not that different from many other apps that let kids create ebooks, but Barber says the potential physical publication of the book helps define the experience.

“I still believe as much as everything is going digital, there is still value in physical artifacts,” she says.

In addition to ordering a professional-quality print of their book, young authors — whether writing from a store or their iPads — can increase their statuses as published authors by adding their creations to Scribble Press’s public ebook library. A 6 year old who wrote about his hearing implant, for instance, has had his book viewed 7,500 times.

Printed books ordered through the Scribble Press iPad app will cost $9.95 plus shipping.

via mashable.com

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How to Set Up Google AdWords Express in 4 Simple Steps (via hubspot)

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:11:00 -0800

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As we discussed yesterday, Google recently released Google AdWords Express for local marketers. This program allows local businesses to set up an AdWords account in minutes, and start advertising to their target markets through Google local search. AdWords Express is conceptually similar to the traditional Google Adwords, but there are some key differences. The major difference with Express is that it was created as an automated, easy-to-manage PPC option for local advertisers. Google automatically selects search queries that ads will be displayed for based on category (like an ad group) selections. There is no need to worry about keywords, bids, or optimization.

While there are pros and cons to automating your PPC campaigns, Google Adwords Express presents a compelling case for local businesses that need to expand their reach under time constraints. If you've weighed the pros and cons and made the decision to experiment with a Google AdWords Express account, here are 4 easy steps to set up your account and launch your AdWords Express campaign in just minutes.

Step 1: Find Your Business

Visit http://www.google.com/adwords/express/ and click the blue, 'Start now' button. First, Google will need to confirm the country where your business is located as well as confirm the phone number associated with that business. The phone number will be confirmed, so make sure this information is accurate. If Google finds your business listing, all you need to do is select the “this is my business” button, and you’ve completed step 1.

If you have not added your business to Google’s listings, you can click “add a new listing,” and Google will walk you through the process to add a new listing.

Step 2: Add Your Information

In this section, Google will ask you to enter a few things regarding your business' information. The more information you enter here the better, as Google will have a better understanding of your account and the ability to keep you posted about nuances and updates. Be sure to add your email and website. The one thing to be very careful about is the category selection.

Google is going to decide which search queries your ads will display for based on the category or categories you select. Think long and hard about this section, and try to limit your campaigns to one section so that you can track them properly. Start typing your industry or related terms into the category box, and Google will start to show you selectable categories.

Step 3: Create Your Ad

This is where the fun part begins! For your specific category, now you get the chance to write your own ad. Remember to adhere to the character limits of the headline and ad description, and keep in mind that every ad you write should relate to your category. Within your ad text, also keep in mind that you should always include an offer, show the value of what the offer is, and include a proposition utilizing a call-to-action that will compel qualified searchers to click on your ad and not the competing ads.

Next, it's time for you to decide where your traffic will be directed. You can choose to direct people to your website (or a unique landing page, which we highly recommended), your Google Places page, or Google+ business page. Remember to direct users to the most relevant page containing the information your potential customers are looking for based on their category search.

Finally, it’s time to determine your budget. Based on your category, Google will recommend a budget for you to assign your campaign. DO NOT simply agree with Google. You should decide what you are comfortable with for a test and assign the budget that you think is best based on your budget, not Google’s assumption of your budget. The minimum budget is $150 per month.

Step 4: Checkout

You knew it was coming. Now it's time to set up your billing profile. Your business information will probably be similar to the information you entered in step two, so this should be pretty quick to complete.

The final step is billing details, in which you can select automatic or manual payments. The only difference here is whether you want to prepay for your AdWords spend or not, and it's totally up to you. Your payment method can either be in the form of a bank account or a credit card.

Something to watch out for is the promotional code. Google often runs promotions, offering something like $100 of free ad spend, so if you know of one or can find one, this is the place to enter the code for your discount.

That’s it! Four easy steps, and your PPC campaign will be live on AdWords Express in minutes. Remember to carefully select your category, take your time when crafting your ad, be cognizant of your budget, and make sure to track results! Without the sophisticated insights that traditional AdWords provides such as keyword data, it is imperative to set up a unique landing page or tracking system so you know exactly what results are being generated from Google AdWords Express. Only then will you be able to make changes to improve performance and be able to identify what is or is not working with your AdWords Express experiment.

via blog.hubspot.com

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Google+ Pages Get Multiple Admins, New Notifications and More (via TNW)

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:03:00 -0800

In what looks to be the last major feature push before the Christmas period, the Google team has today announced a number of new updates for Google+, delivering multi-admin controls, new notifications and +1 analytics.

After listening to user feedback after the public launch of Pages (which saw us reinstate our The Next Web account), Google now allows brands and businesses to nominate up to 50 named managers as administrators for a page — perfect for companies with large marketing and social media teams that previously needed to share login credentials.

Also dropping is a new notification flow that delivers all of the activity on a page, giving admins the chance to keep an eye on conversations, messages and shares of their content.

In an effort to provide managers with a better idea of how Google+ users are interacting with page content, Google has combined counts of users that have engaged with a page, whether it be a +1 or the addition of a page to a circle.

To demonstrate the new features, Google has posted a new video which describes each of the new features and how to add them:

With additional page controls, Google has taken a step closer to providing users with access to features similar to Facebook Pages. Google says this is just the start of its page updates, we will of course notify you of them as they roll out.

via thenextweb.com

this will help more businesses and organizations use g+

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Foursquare? Wherefore Art Thou, Foursquare? (via Social Media Explorer)

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 21:58:00 -0800

I’m not sure about you, but I’ve seen increasingly less activity on my Foursquare account lately, in my own stream and others’. While I do have a few new friends every so often, those whom I’ve followed for a long time (Foursquare early adopters, like myself) seem to not be checking in as much (and nor am I). The leaderboard has thinned and the checkins seem more and more mundane (Gym, Starbucks, office. Repeat.)

Foursquare now claims 10 million users, and Walmart had 149,484 checkins the week of Thanksgiving. Those feel like very small numbers, at least when compared to Facebook (800 million active users). And considering that there are about 3,800 Walmart stores nationwide, that’s only 39 checkins per store. Through the whole week of Black Friday. Meh.

At the same time, Foursquare has added a ton of new features, which could really attract and engage new users as well as old. A couple of weeks ago I checked into a movie theater and was given the option to select the movie I was there to see. Foursquare has partnered with MovieTickets.com to provide showtimes and ticket purchases in-app, which is pretty cool: if you’re checking in about a movie it’s highly likely you will want to share which movie.

Foursquare also recently announced two new buttons for site owners to use to connect their readers directly the app. The more interesting of the two is a “save to Foursquare” feature which allows a user to add a location (restaurant, event, store, etc.) to their Foursquare to-do list. Instead of emailing myself the page as a reminder, a quick click will add it. The other button will allow you to follow a person or business on Foursquare. I fear that these new buttons will get lost in “button fatigue,” though, and many websites won’t adopt them.

And therein lies the real problem: Do we have time for Foursquare? If the early adopters have dropped off, who’s actually using it? And where does Foursquare hope to get new growth from? It may be from “the kids” – the 13-24 year olds who came later to Twitter and still may be more prone to text than tweet. And the retail buying power of some of these kids is strong, though they don’t control nearly as much budget as the 25-plusses do. I’m worried that if the early adopters no longer care, the momentum for growth will be lost.

What does this mean for brands and local businesses? I’ve never been a huge proponent of Foursquare for businesses, unless you’re a retailer. I’m going to stand by that sentiment for the moment. If you’re JC Penney, Amex, or Radio Shack it may make sense for you to create campaigns, which you can run nationally and amortize over hundreds of locations. And if you are a small business retailer or have a consumer location, you should certainly have a Foursquare presence, because you want to control how your business is presented. But I wouldn’t put a whole lot of time or effort into it, at least not if you’re outside the major East and West Coast cities where there are heavier concentrations of Foursquare users. Unless, of course, you test it and find a great response from your customers. (Isn’t that the key to marketing anyway? Test, test, and test some more!)

I’m not dooming Foursquare entirely, just saying that it feels like growth will be limited and it won’t ever be for every business (or user). Perhaps your local bar is using it successfully today (are you the mayor?), but don’t expect every business you come into contact with to jump on board.

Is your business using Foursquare? And where do you think it’s headed? Do you agree or disagree with my assessment? I’d really love to hear about your successes, or failures, in the comments, as well as your analysis of Foursquare’s future.

Related articles

Foursquare Teams Up With NY Mag, Time Out, Other Publishers (paidcontent.org)

The One-Percenters Of Recommendations (marketersstudio.com)

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via socialmediaexplorer.com

I'm using foursquare, but often it's through an app like picplz or levelup, so I don't see the new features. also, I tend to check in to venues after I'm settled in, making for a lot of 'doh' moments when I see there's a deal I could have redeemed

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Permission is the Enemy of Speed (via Convince & Convert)

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 21:54:00 -0800

This week I’ve been writing about speed and response expectations for business on the social Web.

Ultimately, speed wins. The companies that engage customers on Twitter and Facebook within minutes are making a none-too-subtle statement about their embrace of the social telephone and the primacy of the customer. In comparison, slow response or no response produces a decided “meh” vibe.

So how do you win the speed race that has no finish line? How do you become uber responsive to your customers on the social Web? Not with technology, and not with tools.

You win by eschewing permission in favor of response time.

Beg for Forgiveness Rather Than Ask for Permission

Every time your front line responder(s) need to find out the answer to a customer question, or check with a manager about how to word something, you have failed to truly embrace the real-time nature of modern customer relations.

That’s why it’s so critically important to staff your social media front lines with people who not only have extraordinary passion for your company, but who also have the experience and judgement to minimize response delay.

The widely held notion that we should staff community manager and similar positions with young, inexpensive, socially savvy people who juggle smart phones like flaming clubs may actually be a terrible idea.

Instead, what if we staffed community manager and similar positions with experienced team members who know the ins and outs of the company, can subsequently answer most questions without asking for help, and most importantly have the judgement that is accrued only with time?

For a while, Frank Eliason at Comcast (now Citi) was held up as the standard. And experienced, wise, consumer affairs-oriented connector with smarts and empathy. But now, as social-powered customer service becomes pervasive, it seems that more companies don’t want to invest in someone like Frank, but instead hire someone who “grew up with this stuff” – regardless of how little organizational understanding that person possesses.

I don’t often see the logic in putting an inexperienced person at the controls of the only part of your company that is truly real-time and exceptionally visible.

Do you?

via convinceandconvert.com

bold, but there's a method to the madness

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17 Ways to Integrate Facebook and Email Marketing (via Convince & Convert)

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 08:21:00 -0800

Killer integration of Facebook and Email

View more presentations from Jay Baer

I won’t write out the entire presentation for you in blog post form – that’s what Slideshare is for – but here are the high points of this presentation on Killer Integration of Facebook and Email Marketing, where I offer 17 specific ways to tie these two important programs together.

2 Sides of the Same Coin

The notion that Facebook is a tool to create new customers is massively flawed. Research from DDB shows that 84% of fans of company Facebook pages are current customers. Of course they are. Think about how you use Facebook. You don’t randomly surf around, clicking the “Like” button for companies of which you’ve never, ever heard. Why would you want their info in your news feed?

Consequently, Facebook is primarily a tool for keeping your brand top-of-mind among customers who have given you permission to do so. Through this messaging, you hope to solicit repeat business and customer advocacy. And email marketing sets out to do the exact same thing.

Thus, the people in charge of Facebook and the people in charge of email marketing in your company should be the SAME PEOPLE.

3 Types of Integration

There are three main areas where Facebook and email marketing can and should be integrated:

Strategic Integration

Channel and Audience Integration

Message Integration

Strategic Integration of Facebook and Email Marketing

There are several areas of overlap here, but perhaps the most illustrative is the fact that the metrics used to measure both tactics are mathematically quite similar, even if we call them different names:

Email subscribes = Facebook “Likes”

Email unsubscribes = Facebook “UnLikes”

Email opens = Facebook impressions

Email clicks = Facebook feedback

Email forwards = Facebook shares

You can even derive the value of your overall Facebook marketing effort by examining it through the prism of your existing email marketing investment. I wrote a post about this new way to calculate what Facebook is worth to your business a while ago. It includes a link to a free Facebook valuation worksheet.

Channel and Audience Integration of Facebook and Email Marketing

The goal is not to get an email opt-in or a Facebook “Like”. The goal is to get both. Consequently, whenever you are asking for you, you should be asking for the other, as well.

Email thank you messages.

Email unsubscribe preference centers.

Facebook landing tabs.

Social log-ins using software like JanRain.

Message Integration of Facebook and Email Marketing

Tons of options here for using (and re-using) your Facebook and email content.

Use email subject line testing to optimize Facebook ad headlines. And vice-versa.

Test image effectiveness via email, incorporate into status updates or Facebook ads. And vice-versa.

Just like Sponsored Stories, incorporate fan expressions of advocacy into your email content.

Incorporate most popular email content into status updates. And vice-versa.

Tease upcoming emails via status update.

Do Not Eat This Entire Sandwich

The presentation has 17 ways to tie Facebook and email together. Do not try to tackle all of those at once. Pick the two to four that make the most sense for your company, and try them. Them, add two more. And two more. Until you’ve integrated your programs in many ways. Remember, however, that your Facebook and email marketing will NEVER be optimally integrated if different groups (or even different agencies) are handling them.

You know how you can tell social media is a truly big deal? It’s become too important to stand on its own.

This is a presentation I originally put together for the Facebook Success Summit. Many thanks to two geniuses and good guys Christopher S. Penn and Chad White for their help and inspiration.

via convinceandconvert.com

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Small, Midsized Businesses Have Most Facebook Reach (via allfacebook)

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 08:19:00 -0800

Social marketing platform Roost set out to determine what types of small and mid-sized businesses rule the roost in terms of growing their social audience and remaining active in marketing.

Roost’s findings include:

Small and mid-sized businesses involved in music, entertainment, and luxury goods had the most reach.

The most active small and mid-sized businesses were in the medical and health industries.

The most efficient “signal-to-noise” ratios were posted by companies in the music and broadcast media sectors.

Medical practices were the most confounding, coming in dead last out of 28 industries analyzed by Roost in terms of reach, but topping the activity list.

Other industries with similarly large gaps included:

Music, number one, 26th in activity;

Consumer electronics, number five versus 23, respectively;

Hotel and hospitality, six versus 25;

Commercial real estate, 25 versus seven;

Fitness, 26 versus five; and

Insurance, 27 and eight.

via allfacebook.com

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Could Google Plus Lose The Battle Against Facebook? (via allfacebook)

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 08:12:00 -0700

Google Plus started out growing faster than any social network has so far, but may not be able to compete against Facebook longer term.

The appeal is not sticking because many of the people that quickly flocked to Google Plus have made their way back to the comfort and familiarity of Facebook.

In fact, the inability to keep users engaged has some observers wondering just how long Google Plus will be able to survive.

A Closer Look At The Battle

Google Plus entered the social game at a time when competition was arguably at its fiercest. Facebook was just reported to have an estimated 750 million active users, while both Twitter and LinkedIn were making notable gains of their own.

In order to garner attention, Google would have to give users a different experience, and different is what it strived to be from the very beginning.

Even in its original beta form, Google Plus was equipped with a new friends system in Circles, a discovery engine in Sparks, and a group video chat tool in Hangouts, which recently made its way to the mobile platform.

Apparently all that wasn’t enough, as Facebook went to work with some countering of its own.

In addition to combating Circles with Smart Lists, and answering Hangouts with a Skype-powered video chat feature, Facebook rolled out some huge updates that once again made it the talk of the town.

The majority of the changes involved making the popular social platform more user-friendly, starting with the news feed.

The news feed has been designed in a manner that presents users with posts that are deemed to be most important to them, opposed to the most recent updates.

According to Facebook Engineering Manager Mark Tonkelowitz, the news feed experience is now like users having their own personal newspaper.

Despite not being embraced by the community as a whole, or at least not at first, the recent changes at Facebook have reclaimed the attention of both the general members and brands who spend their time on the site.

And while Google Plus still has some attributes that enable it to stand out, the lack of activity and return visits is a sign that users are having trouble justifying its worth in comparison to what they already have in Facebook.

Last Chance?

Google Plus is not the search giant’s first attempt at social networking.

If you recall, the company launched Google Buzz in 2010, which fizzled out due to a major privacy flaw that accompanied the initial release and the same issue the company faces today — being useful in what can be considered an overly crowded space.

Google Plus definitely has more potential than Buzz, but should it bomb, it could very well be the last shot at ever touching Facebook in the social realm.

Guest writer Aidan Hijleh is a freelance copywriter and serves as the non-profit partnership liaison for Benchmark Email.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

via allfacebook.com

think reports of g+ demise may be premature

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What Google+ Brand Pages Could Look Like [PICS] (via mashable)

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 13:15:00 -0700

via mashable.com

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Did Facebook Just Beat Google At Its Own Game? (via allfacebook)

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 23:06:00 -0700

Ken Deeter, Facebook Engineer

The keyword used to be the exclusive province of Google, and one of the things that may ensure Google doesn’t become completely overshadowed by Facebook. But then Twitter’s trending topics began to eat into that monopoly.

Now Facebook may show you stories from multiple people about the same topic. How does the social network do it? How do they prevent you from seeing a bunch of stories about dogs or bananas?

It turns out, one of Facebook’s engineers revealed the secret sauce on Quora. But he did so in quite opaque, academic language, so I’m going to break it down into real-people-speak (for myself and you).

Ken Deeter explains:

I was the lead engineer on this project so I’ll give this a shot. Without going into too much secret sauce…

1. We build language models based on publicly available corpora for our entity extraction. Based on this data we can extract topics at various levels of confidence. To answer your question, yes, it can figure out terms like “arrested development” out of normal text. It can also disambiguate between words like “Apple” the fruit, and “Apple” the computer company.

2. We have a second level of infrastructure that tries to use other data to increase accuracy. Generally you can think of this adding more context into the equation, whereas the first level only takes into account the text of a message.

3. We have some heuristics to decide to show a particular cluster. Generally this is a combination of trying to filter out noise from the extraction system, and deciding when something is newsworthy enough to show. Two of your friends talking about bananas, for example, is pretty uninteresting.

Like I said, we’re going to have to break that down.

Facebook’s Language Models

Facebook probably also uses lists of the names of pages with many likes (including place and community pages).

Perhaps the company dips into other publicly available lists of hot topics like Google and Twitter trends or the Yahoo Buzz Index.

The social network, however, has all kinds of data on what people on Facebook are sharing, what pages they’re commenting on and so on.

So even if the company uses only internal resources, there’s a huge amount of data on what the most popular topics are at any one time.

Context Improves Keyword Groupings

What this reminds me of is Google’s related keywords. One of the things that goes into Google’s rankings is whether you use ancillary words and phrases surrounding the main keyword.

For example, for consideration of whether you should rank for “camping gear,” do you talk about things like tents, boots, hiking, fires, food, and water purification? It could work like that on Facebook, which might also use a social context.

I suspect from Facebook advertising’s topic targeting that the company has quantified the affinities between various precise interests. In other words, Facebook knows that if you like the band Coldplay, there’s a 35 percent chance you also like Death Cab For Cutie.

This is just an example, and probably the wrong value. But if Facebook wonders whether you’re writing about a politician and you have many politically-oriented likes in your profile, that would be a context that would increase confidence that you’re talking about that keyword.

Heuristics, Important Topics and Salience

I just love to use the word salience whenever I can. I once studied attention deficit disorder, and in this mental condition the brain has trouble determining what is most salient (important or high priority).

If you have a low signal to noise ratio, cognitively, you can’t focus on something (signal) and ignore all the other stuff going on at the time (noise).

So Facebook is using some rules of thumb (heuristics) to arrive at whether a topic is important enough and talked about enough to show in the news feed.

The example he gives is something mundane (bananas — who cares?) and a small amount of conversation (two people).

However, we must assume that if 10,000 people talk about bananas and Google News is carrying a story about a problem with bananas, it’s an important topic and we should show posts around that keyword.

Will Facebook Kill Google With This?

The fact that Facebook has developed algorithms around keywords is a big problem for Google. As soon as Facebook includes keywords as an option in Facebook advertising, Google AdWords (Google’s primary revenue source) becomes much less important.

AdWords may always have a leg up since it analyzes keywords for all websites, but why shouldn’t Facebook move this direction? Why shouldn’t the social network make its search functionality as good as Google’s?

Google has not proven they can successfully imitate Facebook’s strengths, but Facebook may be showing they can duplicate Google’s.

Brian Carter is the author of The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money on Facebook. He’s also speaking at Socialize West this Thursday.

via allfacebook.com

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A True Measure Of Influence | BrandSavant

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 17:14:00 -0700

Influence scores, as we know them today, are all based upon algorithms. Algorithms are commonly confused with formulae, but they are surely two different things. The volume of a circle is a formula – it’s math. That x number of retweets has y effect on your influence score, however, is an algorithm. There might be some math in there, but I like to think of algorithms as math plus assumptions.

An influence score makes assumptions about the value of your follower count, how many people click on your links, etc., and then bashes those assumed values together with yet another set of assumptions – their supposed relationship to each other. Yes, there are mathematical functions involved, but just as the “likely voter model” many pollsters use for pre-election polls can never predict whether or not a specific individual will actually vote, the influence score will never be able to predict the impact of an individual on the behavior(s) you are trying to influence.

And that’s really the biggest issue with these scores, isn’t it? All of the algorithms being used by these services are amalgamating the behaviors of the many, and attempting to assign a value to the individual. This kind of inductive reasoning is always problematic. Here’s why:

Measure Three Times, Cut Once

There are, broadly, three kinds of measures: descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive (and these aren’t mutually exclusive – the best measures have elements of two or three of these all rolled into one.) Descriptive measures tell us what happened. Diagnostic measures tell us why it happened. And predictive measures help us make good guesses about what might happen in the future. The modern crop of influence scores (and I’m talking specifically about the single, reductive and non-context-specific number from 1-100 most of these sites spit out) are, I would argue, purely descriptive measures.

What Klout scores (or those from PeerIndex, or TweetLevel) can fairly be said to reflect is this: activity. It’s demonstrably true that increased activity on social networks (particularly Twitter) has a correlation with higher scores. Activity is not “influence,” of course, but it is something, and I’m not prepared to dismiss that something out of hand. So my influence score may in fact reflect some measure of my activity online, and my ability to encourage some form of activity in others. Thus, my score is descriptive of that activity level. It is not diagnostic of that level, however.

The scores, as they are presented, are inscrutable. My Klout score has fluctuated a fair amount in the past 60 days. I’m not sure why. I’m sure there are some very defensible assumptions for that fluctuation built in to Klout’s algorithm, but the point is that the reasons for that variance are entirely opaque to me. In other words, my score, and even the peripherals around it to which I have access, do not tell me why the fluctuation occurred. Thus, influence scores can not be used as diagnostic measures. (My topics, however, are right on the money. Klout is nailing this lately.)

A Cosmetic Problem

Similarly, the scores are predictive of nothing, which actually makes them very difficult to use. For example, I’m fond of comparing my Klout score with Snooki’s Klout score. After several months of concentrated effort, I have finally pulled ahead of Snooki (see, Mom? I told you I’d eventually make you proud.) But if you represented a cosmetics company trying to launch a new brand of sub-premium skin bronzer, who would you target – me, or Snooki? The answer is obvious, of course, but consider this: if my Klout is 68, and Snooki’s is 65, how much worse would I be at pushing bronzer? Would Snooki be twice as effective? Three times? A thousand times? There are two answers to this, of course. One is that as I am just one shade darker than an albino, the right answer is probably one million. The other answer is – you cannot possibly tell, and the scores obfuscate this, if anything.

So we have a purely descriptive measure – the influence score – but we lack the diagnostic and predictive measures that would allow us to do what every organization should be doing: learning, optimizing, and getting better. How can your company or brand take a flawed measure – the influence score – and make it better?

What Are We Really Trying To Measure?

Well, since the various influence measures are based upon a series of assumptions, let’s make a few of our own, here. First of all, most popular influence measures are heavily, if not entirely, based upon Twitter activity. Twitter’s asymmetric nature essentially means it functions as a broadcast platform – the few, reaching the many – so let’s start with something we can sink our analytical teeth into: reach and frequency. When an individual tweets out a link to some kind of content or offer, they do so with two hopes: that their followers will click on the link, and that their followers will retweet or otherwise disseminate the link to their networks, thereby increasing the potential reach of the message. So, when someone solicits, either explicitly or craftily, one of the various social media power users to help disseminate a message, the clear hope is that their message will be spread to as many people as possible using network effects.

While the exact relationship between followers and impressions is nearly impossible to calculate using clickstream measures (you have no way of knowing, after all, how many of your followers actually had the opportunity to see your message, let alone read it), it’s safe to say that more is better; in other words, there is undoubtedly a positive correlation between follower count and the number of people who interact with a given message to those followers. So, let’s assume that the behavior you are measuring for is retweets: tacit endorsements of your message, and increased exposure. Again, this is a pure reach and frequency game, and far easier to measure than “influence,” per se.

Introducing “APM”

Here is a thing you can know: the average number of retweets per follower on Twitter. If you sifted through all that clickstream data from Twitter and examined tweets that contained links (we’ll exclude “conversational” tweets,) you could come up with the number of people who retweeted a given message, and then compare that to the number of followers to the original tweeter. In other words, if I had 5000 followers, and my typical links are retweeted by an average of 20 people, then I have a concrete number to look at: I can generate one retweet for every 250 followers, or 4 for every 1000. This smells suspiciously like a CPM number, doesn’t it? But to be cute, let’s call it “APM,” or actions-per-thousand. If my average link tweet gets retweeted 20 times, and I have 5000 followers, I can generate 4 APM.

With me so far? Now, let’s say that we do this for all Twitter users over a period of time to come up with an “average” APM. It won’t look as linear as the graph below suggests, but roughly let us assume that the average tweeted link is retweeted 10 times for every 1000 followers of the original tweeter. So, as the graph below shows, 20,000 followers would get me 200 retweets, 30,000 would elicit 300, and so on. So, the “Twitter average” APM is 10 (it isn’t, by the way ) .

So now I have a benchmark by which to measure my influencer campaign. Back to my original example, suppose my sub-premium bronzer brand (Ecruage, by CASPER) used Klout Perks to identify people with Klout scores above 65 to target. Now, since neither Snooki nor I have “Cosmetics” as a topic, this requires a bit of a leap of faith on the part of our brand, but not the worst one I’ve seen. So, Snooki and I each get sent a crate of bronzer, and we go to town on the Twitters. Snooki has a lot more followers than I do, of course, but we can both fairly be graded on the APM scale I’ve outlined above.

So I try this crappy bronzer, and I tweet about it. My followers expect me to talk about social media research, consumer behavior, bad music and gin, so my crappy bronzer message comes off as a bit of a non sequitur, as the graph below illustrates:

So while the average Twitter user might generate an APM of 10 (10 actions per 1,000 followers), on this particular message I only got an APM of 4.2. Not so good, CASPER! Snooki, however, gets all serious about this bronzer, and tweets the crap out of it. On an apples-to-apples, retweets-per-follower basis, her graph might look like this (Snooki is the top line):

So, on the topic of crappy bronzer, Snooki might have initiated an APM of 15. There is a clear delta between Snooki’s effectiveness in disseminating this message (the top line) and mine (the bottom line). Two things about this delta: first, it’s endlessly reassuring to me (this is not a contest I’d care to win.) Second – that delta between the expected value (10 APM, or retweets-per-thousand-followers) and Snooki’s (15 APM) can fairly be described by one word:

Influence.

This is influence, folks. Whatever magical power Snooki worked on this crappy bronzer message (a likely mixture of the relevance of her message to her audience, her perceived authority on the topic, and the actual logical content of her tweet) she was simply better at disseminating this message than I was – and not by a little. The variance shown between her APM and the expected APM IS influence – it’s the mojo she worked using the same system as everyone else, measured like-for-like, that made her far more effective at getting people to spread her message. More message dissemination = more awareness = more trial = more usage. The circle of marketing life goes ever on and on.

The APM Index

Now, if you’d really like to wow your CMO, you could convert Snooki’s effectiveness and my (in)effectiveness into indices, which allows you to compare all of the “influencers” whom you targeted relative to the average. Here’s a primer on calculating index scores if you need one, but essentially all you do is divide the average for the category into the number you are comparing it to, and multiply by 100. This means that the average for ANY index is 100 (in essence, if you divide the average into the average, you get 1, which multiplied by 100 = 100.) Snooki’s APM of 15 equates to an index of 150 ((15/10) x 100), while my paltry effort comes out to an index of 42.

So, to close the loop on this, we started with two similar Klout scores:

Snooki: 65
Tom: 68

…and we end up with our own, topic-specific measure of actual, observed influence – as expressed by the differential in message dissemination:

Snooki: 150
Average: 100
Tom: 42

In my example, there is considerable difference between the original descriptive statistic (the Klout score) and this statistic, which moves us much more in the direction of a predictive statistic (at least on the topic of bronzer, and perhaps the category of cosmetics) that the learning organization can use to make the next “influencer” campaign even better. The influence score helped to make the initial cut, perhaps, but the only way for your company or brand to truly gauge influence is to do the work, and determine which individuals outperformed the average, and which underperformed.

Caveats, Carefully Considered

Now, there are a couple of things (at least) that one might take issue with here – both of which could fairly be described as oversimplifications on my part. The first, obviously, is that the mystical force that allowed Snooki to generate an APM of 15 compared to the average of 10 might not wholly be attributable to “influence.” But if it ain’t an answer, I don’t care – it at least serves as a handy heuristic for the nearly unmeasurable constellation of circumstances between the original tweeter and his/her audience that caused the message to mysteriously do better than the average would have predicted. Influence? Yeah, I think so. It’s at least behavioral, relevant, and a lot closer to “influence” than the activity-based scores we currently have – with the bonus of being relevant to your brand.

The other bone you might pick with me here is that my calculation – and reducing the whole model to differential message dissemination – is also overly reductive. I’ve taken what is surely a complex system and turned it into a back-of-the-envelope calculation. You’re right – it is a back-of-the-envelope calculation. That’s why companies might actually do it. You don’t need an analytics whiz on your staff to take this first pass at measuring your influencer campaigns, and until everybody catches up with you, this’ll do. Master this first, then break out the HAL 9000 when it’s time to make finer distinctions. (I also know a really smart social media research company that could help. Just sayin’.)

The bottom line is this – let’s say you actually use influence scores as some kind of crude segmentation – how will you test your work? How will you know, in other words, if your efforts were successful – and more importantly – what you can learn from them to make them better? The answer, I would submit, is to start with the current crop of popular influence measures as a first pass, but remember that they will never be as accurate as your own performance measures, even as crude as the one I’ve suggested here. There is nothing wrong with Klout, PeerIndex or any of these measures. There are only lazy marketers. And if you are reading this far, my friend, at word 2,200, you are surely not that.

Related Posts:
On Klout-Bashing
Understanding Klout
A Brief Klout Update
Should Klout Scores Be “Stickier?”
A Primer On Influence Measures

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via brandsavant.com

this reminds me of the reasoning I used back when I was doing analytics for the grocery biz. first we'd do a demographic breakdown of a group of zip codes or census tracts around retailer locations by age of head of household and presence/absence of kids. next we'd do a consumption grid for a given brand or size, flavor, whatever against those demos. finally, we'd map that grid (usually national data with a minimal sample size) against the zip codes and tell the retailer "you should carry these size/flavor/whatever in your stores - here's the analysis showing that it will appeal to your consumers." then we'd run away and bury the data in a deep hole.

this is a little like that, except we never went so far as to identify specific people in those neighborhoods....

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What I Don't Like About Klout (via paulgillin.com)

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 10:34:00 -0700

Estimating influence is a delicate balance of art and science. People are drawn to quantitative methods because scores are easy to understand. The downside of reducing influence to a number, though, is oversimplification.

Lately, I’ve been looking at Klout, the popular new tool that bills itself as “The Standard” for influence measurement. The more I look at it, the less I like it.

via gillin.com

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Fluid personal communication in the era of Facebook, Skype and Google+ (via gigaom)

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 17:57:00 -0700

This week’s announcement of Skype’s acquisition of GroupMe, and the recent introduction of Facebook’s Beluga-based Messenger, are part of something much bigger than group text messaging: The landscape of personal online communication is changing. The very communication paradigms we’re accustomed to — email, text messaging, chat and wall posts — are starting to be blurred and redesigned. In the next generation of social media interaction, users will communicate online in ways that better mirror their organic interactions in real life. Welcome to the age of fluid personal communication.

In a thoughtful recent post Om said:

“…instead of getting bogged down by the old-fashioned notion of communication – phone calls, emails, instant messages and text messages – [Google] needs to think about interactions…..To me, interactions are synchronous, are highly personal, are location-aware and allow the sharing of experiences, whether it’s photographs, video streams or simply smiley faces. Interactions are supposed to mimic the feeling of actually being there. Interactions are about enmeshing the virtual with the physical.”

I agree, but the concept of fluid communication goes deeper. Until now, personal electronic communication could be crudely divided into two types – active and passive. Email, chat and text messaging are the prototypical active forms. Facebook wall posts, tweets, and Google+ posts, are the prototypical passive ones. Until recently, these two types lived separate lives, but that’s changing, and with it are some of our basic assumptions about online communication. Here are some thoughts about the new challenges and how to deal with them.

Three issues combine to make the story interesting: groups, informational side effects, and the social contract inherent to social networks. They are all important, but the interaction among them is particularly interesting – and confusing.

Groups. If you think of the continuum between emailing a small group of people and posting to a newsgroup or mailing list, Facebook wall posts resemble the latter. But the recent introduction of Google+ Circles, and the renewed interest this has brought to the long-standing (if somewhat dormant) Facebook Lists, blurs the boundaries. Is sharing a photo with my eight-member “Immediate Family” List on Facebook (or the corresponding Circle on Google+) much different than sending the group an email with that photo attached? Experience suggests it’s not.

Informational side effects. Email has long recognized informational side effects — the distinction between To and Bcc is the best example of it. When I address a message to Sally and Bill we’ve achieved common knowledge of the content: we are all aware of the message. When I send a message to Sally but Bcc Bill, something more complex happens: Sally and I achieve common knowledge of the content, and Bill and I achieve common knowledge of both the message content and the fact that Sally and I have common knowledge of it. There are other, more subtle informational side effects of To. For starters, if Sally and Bill don’t know each other, then by emailing them both together I’ve made their existence common knowledge, and disclosed that I have a relationship with both. And obviously they now can communicate directly. I once had a banker who sent email to several of his clients using To, a gross privacy violation. The banker could have used Bcc in that instance, but in other cases that’s throwing away the baby with the bath water. For example, a company may need to send a message to its investors. It’s important that everyone know who all the investors are, but at the same time it may be inappropriate to reveal their email addresses.

Social contract. Careful control of who sees what is perhaps something of a corner case in email, and one can imagine various ways to deal with it; for example, in the company investor’s case, one could Bcc everyone, and includes just their names in the body of the message. But what is possibly a corner case in email becomes central in social media.

A social network is not merely a communication medium. It is first and foremost a place in which social contracts are established and maintained; and when you overlay a communication framework over such a social graph new things happen. The most noticeable complication arises when the social network requires permission to establish a social connection. For example, when I post on my wall, since Facebook adopts a version of email’s “reply-all,” my friends see each other’s posts. Is it appropriate for two of my friends who are not mutually connected to comment on each other’s comment?

So what does this all mean?

The lesson from this is that in the era of social networks we need to revisit communication conventions that previously served us well. In particular, we can’t take for granted the distinction between active and passive communication. Every developer of a new communication service should ask him/herself the following questions:

When a group is created, are the group members aware of it in any way? If yes, what exact information do they get and who decides it?

Is the communication style active, passive, or does it span the spectrum?

What are possible responses to a group message? Reply? Reply-all? Reply-only-to-other-people-who-have-also-replied? Reply-only-to-people-the-sender-is-connected-to?

When a user communicates with a group, what information does each recipient have about the other recipients?

Who can initiate communication with whom? In particular, when a group receives a message, can any group member now communicate freely with any other member?

If I create a group and communicate with it, and the system permits the recipients to freely initiate new communications with the group, does it remain “my” group or have I now put it in the public domain?

Overlaying multicast communication on top of a social graph is tricky; you need to think about the informational side effects and to respect social contracts. This can get complicated, but the issues are real. To borrow from Einstein: Communication in social networks should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Yoav Shoham is a professor of computer science at Stanford University and co-founder of Katango. These issues have been the subject of much discussion at Katango, but this should not be viewed as describing Katango’s strategy or product offering; the goal is to have a conversation among all of us attempting to improve users’ digital social experience.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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NewNet Q1: Content Farms and Niche Networks on the Rise
5 NewNet Milestones That Won’t Happen in 2011
Flash analysis: the tech startup investment environment, Q3 2011

via gigaom.com

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Making It Easier to Share With Who You Want (via facebook blog)

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 16:49:00 -0700

Today we're announcing a bunch of improvements that make it easier to share posts, photos, tags and other content with exactly the people you want. You have told us that "who can see this?" could be clearer across Facebook, so we have made changes to make this more visual and straightforward. The main change is moving most of your controls from a settings page to being inline, right next to the posts, photos and tags they affect. Plus there are several other updates here that will make it easier to understand who can see your stuff (or your friends') in any context. Here's what's coming up, organized around two areas: what shows up on your profile, and what happens when you share something new.

On Your Profile

Your profile should feel like your home on the web - you should never feel like stuff appears there that you don't want, and you should never wonder who sees what's there. The profile is getting some new tools that give you clearer, more consistent controls over how photos and posts get added to it, and who can see everything that lives there.

Inline Profile Controls

Before: Most of the settings for stuff on your profile were a few clicks away on a series of settings pages.

Going Forward: Content on your profile, from your hometown to your latest photo album, will appear next to an icon and a drop-down menu. This inline menu lets you know who can see this part of your profile, and you can change it with one click.

A side benefit of moving most settings to inline controls is a much shorter and simpler Settings page. A bunch of settings that were there previously have been moved directly inline, and a handful have been replaced or removed. (You can find more detail on the profile settings here: http://www.facebook.com/about/control)

Profile Tag Review

Before: Photos you were tagged in would show up on your profile as soon as you were tagged. One of the top requests we've heard is for the ability to approve these tags before they show up on your profile.

Going Forward: You can choose to use the new tool to approve or reject any photo or post you are tagged in before it's visible to anyone else on your profile.

Content Tag Review

Before: Anyone who could see your photos or posts could add tags to them.

Going Forward: You have the option to review and approve or reject any tag someone tries to add to your photos and posts.

View Profile As…

Before: We heard you wanted to know what your profile looked like to others, but the tool for doing this was behind the scenes.

Going Forward: This tool is now on the top of your profile where it's easier to access.

When You Share

In addition to the profile changes, it will now be more visually straightforward to understand and control who can see your posts at the time you share them. We're also broadening the functionality of the sharing tool: now if you want to make your posts more expressive, we've made it simple to add location and tag the people you're with.

Inline controls

Before: Controls for who could see your stuff on Facebook lived on a settings page a few clicks away.

Going Forward: The control for who can see each post will be right inline. For each audience, there is now an icon and label to help make it easier to understand and decide who you're sharing with. Also, when you tag someone, the audience label will automatically update to show that the person tagged and their friends can see the post.

This dropdown menu will be expanding over time to include smaller groups of people you may want to share with, like co-workers, Friend Lists you've created, and Groups you're a member of. These will make it easy to quickly select exactly the audience you want for any post.

If you're posting to Facebook from a phone or app that does not yet support inline controls, your setting will be the same as it is today. You can change this with a new setting available on your privacy settings page. (For a guided tour of these new controls, go here: http://www.facebook.com/about/sharing)

Word Change: "Everyone" to "Public"

Before: You had the option to share a post with Everyone, which meant that anyone on the internet might be able to see it.

Going Forward: We are changing the name of this label from Everyone to Public so that the control is more descriptive of the behavior: anyone may see it, but not everyone will see it. This is just to make the setting more clear, and it's just a language change.

Change Your Mind After You Post?

Before: Once you posted a status update, you couldn't change who could see it.

Going Forward: Now you'll be able to change who can see any post after the fact. If you accidentally posted something to the wrong group, or changed your mind, you can adjust it with the inline control at any time.

Tag Who You're With, or What You Want to Talk About

Before: You could only tag someone if you were friends with them, and you could only tag a Page if you had liked it. This felt broken or awkward if you had a photo album of co-workers and had to become Facebook friends to tag them in the photos.

Going Forward: You can add tags of your friends or anyone else on Facebook. If you are ever tagged by a non-friend, it won't appear on your profile unless you review and approve the post.

Tag Locations in Posts

Before: You could only "check in" to locations using the Places feature on a smart phone.

Going Forward: Now you can add location to anything. Lots of people use Facebook to talk about where they are, have been or want to go. Now you can add location from anywhere, regardless of what device you are using, or whether it is a status update, photo or Wall post. Of course, you can always choose not to add location at all.

As a part of this, we are phasing out the mobile-only Places feature. Settings associated with it are also being phased out or removed. (You can read more about how location works and settings affected here: http://www.facebook.com/about/location)

Remove Tags or Content from Facebook

Before: When we asked, people had different ideas of what removing a tag actually did, and different motivations for wanting to remove them.

Going Forward: Your options for removing tags or content on Facebook are presented more clearly. Your options are: removing from your profile, removing the tag itself, messaging the photo owner or tagger, and requesting the content get taken down. (More details on tagging can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/about/tagging)

These changes will start to roll out in the coming days. When they reach you, you'll see a prompt for a tour that walks you through these new features from your homepage. In the meantime, you can read more about the upcoming changes from the links throughout this post. We'll look forward to your feedback on all of this.

Taken together, we hope these new tools make it easier to share with exactly who you want, and that the resulting experience is a lot clearer and a lot more fun.

via blog.facebook.com

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Google Steps Up Attack on Facebook's Turf (via WSJ)

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:08:00 -0700

By AMIR EFRATI
Google Inc. launched its most ambitious social-networking effort yet, broadening a battle with Facebook Inc. to grab the attention of Web users and future advertising dollars.

The new Google product, Google , is aimed at exploiting what has been considered a weakness of Facebook—that by default people using the social network share all their information with a large group of friends, including their work colleagues and acquaintances, rather than only their close personal friends. Numerous social-networking companies such as Path Inc. have sprung up to attract people who only wish to share information with smaller groups.

View Full Image
Reuters
A screen shot of the Google Plus social network

The Google project is in a "field trial period" meaning it is an invitation-only product and is expected to be made available more broadly in the future.

The effort to create what became Google started in earnest last February after Google's social-networking service Google Buzz flopped with users, in large part after backlash that resulted from when it made email address books visible to other people. Last summer The Wall Street Journal reported that Google was developing a new Facebook rival.

Journal Community

via online.wsj.com

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4 Facebook Marketing Tactics You Might Not Know About (via SEOmoz)

Thu, 26 May 2011 10:10:00 -0700

So you think you have Facebook all figured out. You have your fan page with a couple custom tabs set up, you've started an ad campaign and every one of your products on your site has the "like" button installed (which increases revenue). Easy peasy, this Facebook stuff is a cinch! Well you're right, it all is pretty easy to implement, but what else could you be doing? What other ways can you utilize Facebook (and its 500 million active users) to help market your company?

These four tactics we're talking about today aren't all new necessarily, but they're fairly new to me. Which got me thinking, if I didn't know about these (or why they were so great for inbound marketing) how many other people also don't know. I'm not trying to claim that if I don't know about it, no one does, because clearly there are people already using them. But the question is... are you? If not, could or should you be? Let's dig right in and take a look at these four Facebook marketing tactics you might not know about (but now you will).

1. Facebook Insights For Your Website

Yes, you read that right. Now, I'm sure you have all seen Insights for your fan pages, but did you know that you could get Facebook Insights for your website? This is a great way to get information about content people are sharing from your site, user demographics, likes and other goodies. We recently set this up and were quite surprised at how much data you could get. Here's a quick blurb straight from Facebook:

Facebook Insights for Domains offers a consolidated view of key metrics for any website, even those that have not implemented Facebook Platform. For example, if a user links to your site in their Facebook status message, that data is included in the analytics for your domain. You can access sharing metrics and demographic information per domain and per URL so you can optimize your content for sharing and better tailor your content to your audience.

First off, it's super easy to set up. Go to http://www.facebook.com/insights/ and click the green "Insights for your Website" button in the upper right hand corner. You'll get a pop up box like the one below, then you just simply add the meta tag inside the

Once you have this in place, the next time you go to the Insights page, you'll not only see your fan pages, but you'll also see your website show up as an option. Below are a couple views of the data Facebook gives you about your site.

This view shows the organic shares of our content by days

This view shows the demographics on people who have liked our content. WHOA!

Additional information:

Official Insights page on Facebook

How To Activate Facebook Insights for Your Website from HubSpot

Facebook Launches “Insights For Your Domain” from All Facebook

2. Facebook Comments

I'll be honest here, I was a big skeptical about why anyone would want to use Facebook comments... that is, until I saw it in action. Let me just walk you through my reaction the first time I posted a comment on TechCrunch which now uses Facebook comments.

1. This is cool, it looks like my comment will get posted to Facebook. Hmm, I wonder what that means really?

2. Cool! It means my comment showed up on my wall.

3. But wait... what? It also showed up in my friend's feed! This is what my boss, Jamie saw in his feed:

4. Within minutes, my boss and husband replied to my comment on Facebook. But not only did their replies show up on Facebook, they also showed up in the TechCrunch post. Whoa... imagine the possibilities!

What makes Facebook comments so great:

Your comments get read by a lot more people.
Neither my boss or husband would have ever read that simple comment I made on TechCrunch. But because it showed up on Facebook, they saw it and replied right then and there. TechCrunch ended up with three comments which they would have only gotten one in a different commenting system. Hello UGC!

Cuts out a lot of spam!
Facebook does all the work of figuring out if a real person is commenting or not. The person has to be logged in to Facebook in order to comment, so you don't get anonymous users. Obviously there are some drawbacks to this since not everyone has an account (the horror!), but you could offer multiple ways to comment like TechCrunch does.

Simple comment moderation
Facebook makes moderation pretty darn easy. You have quick access to edit, ban and subscribe yourself to certain feeds.

Additional information:

Facebook Rolls Out Overhauled Comments System (Try Them Now On TechCrunch)

Why and how to use Facebook Comments on your blog from Raven

3. Local Business Listings

If you're a small business owner or local business, you may have already noticed these random Facebook pages showing up for your company. These are pages automatically created by Facebook. Initially I was pretty annoyed by these, but then realized you could utilize them for your advantage. Let's take a look at an example of a bar in NYC.

Run a search for "billy marks west" and you'll see one of these pages in the SERPs

Ok so these pages can rank for your branded name, which could help you take over a SERP for your name. The crazy part though, is that Facebook lets anyone (yes... anyone) edit these pages.

Sure it's a little crazy that the edit button is open to everyone, but if you keep it on your radar and remember to check the page often, you can ensure the information doesn't get changed incorrectly.

Facebook is trying to get updated information about all types of locations, including cities. For example, when I went to the New York, New York Facebook City page, I got a pop-up asking me to edit it.

This page shows 3 of my friends have checked in at the MoMA

Which led me to the "community edit" page that asks me to add detail about New York City. Whoa... so I can add information about New York? Again, imagine the possibilities.

Of course, this could also lead to people adding incorrect information, trolling your company and many other negative things. But if you keep your local page up-to-date and keep track of the edits, you have yet another page in your marketing arsenal!

Additional Information:

Anyone have a good post about this I could link to? :)

4. Facepile

I'm going to be honest here, I sometimes just like to yell out "Facepile!" It's just a fun word to say. :) Ok, ok I'll get back on the subject at hand. You may not know the name for it, but I'm sure you've all seen something the image below before, right? Facepile is the plugin that displays photos of your friends (as long as you're logged into Facebook) who like the particular website you're on.

But have you thought about taking this one step further and adding Facepile to a conversion page? Just how much do you think your conversions could increase if users saw their friends smiling faces right before they signed up for or purchased something? Foursquare does a great job of this if you go to one of their location pages not logged in.

I went out looking for other great conversion pages that use Facepile and I ran across the MailChimp sign up page. Sadly there's a big huge "white space" area which could probably benefit from adding this feature. Here's a (horrible) mock-up of what it might look like if they added Facepile to that bare area.

Additional Information:

Official Facebook Facepile developer page

If you can find other great information about using Facepile, please let me know and I'll link to it

Now there you have it. Four Facebook marketing tactics you might not know about. For me it's always fun to find these "hidden" gems, especially when there right there staring you in the face. What other tactics do you use that may not be very well known?

This post was originally a presentation I did for our meetup in NYC earlier this month. Feel free to check it out on Slideshare:

4 Facebook Marketing Tactics You Should be Using
View more presentations from Jennifer Lopez

Rand, Rhea Drysdale and Avi Wilensky also spoke that night and you can find their presentations here:

Rand - Exploring the New Opportunity in Google's Social Search Features
Rhea - Supplemental Hell - How to Fix "New" Indexing Issues
Avi - Google Instant – For Keyword Research, Content Generation, and Competitive Analysis

via seomoz.org

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WordPress: The Free Software With a Big Economy & How You Can Get Involved - TNW Design & Dev

Sat, 21 May 2011 16:04:00 -0700

Just about everyone reading this will be familiar with WordPress: it’s the behemoth on the content management scene, employed by millions of blogs and web publications large and small alike. The Next Web runs on WordPress, as do most of our competitors, and these days you have to look a little harder to find sites that run on the giants of the past such as Joomla! (formerly Mambo) and the perpetual underdog, Drupal.

WordPress has evolved in huge ways over the years, and generally for the better. What started out as a system known exclusively as a blogging platform can be used to run a wide variety of site types. The team is constantly updating the software with features that cater to a variety of users from bloggers to theme developers: as an editor, for example, some of my favorite features that have come out in recent years are simply things that make managing the publication pipeline easier.

And with the framework offered by the platform for theme developers so ridiculously easy to understand, WordPress has probably made more PHP dabblers out of designers than any other project.

The History of WordPress

WordPress was born out of a predecessor known as b2, one of the first open source blogging platforms. In 2003, b2 was already responsible for running more than 2,000 blogs — considering that the concept was still fairly new and had only been embraced by a swath of early adopters, these numbers were significant, though a pale shadow of WordPress’ reach today.

In 2003, Matt Mullenweg — CEO of Automattic and the face of WordPress — and Mike Little forked b2 to create WordPress. To fork is an open source development term that refers to the process of taking an existing open source project and creating a new branch of it, often with its own new leadership and development team. It was then that Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little’s project superseded b2, and even b2′s founder Michel Valdrighi is a contributing developer for WordPress.

Mullenweg founded Automattic, Inc. in August 2005, which held the WordPress trademark until September last year, when the company relinquished its most valuable asset to the WordPress Foundation.

“It’s important for me to know that WordPress will be protected and that the brand will continue to be a beacon of open source freedom regardless of whether any company is as benevolent as Automattic has been thus far,” Mullenweg said in a blog post at the time.

Automattic puts much of its resources into developing WordPress, which as an open source project they do not own. You’ve probably heard of some of their other projects, too: the free hosted blogging service WordPress.com, the forum software bbPress, spam filter Akismet, BuddyPress (a social networking plugin for WordPress), Gravatar and the hugely popular WordCamps. That’s just naming a few.

The Rise of the WordPress Economy

For years, the commercial viability of open source development has been a subject of much debate, with the traditional answer from open source advocates suggesting businesses offer support services around their open source projects. Unfortunately, such approaches make scaling a business incredibly hard, as these services are one-to-one.

But as WordPress began to grow in popularity and adoption, it became apparent that there were ample opportunities for businesses to take a scaleable one-to-many approach. In fact, Automattic was one of the first to do so.

“I have always believed that the Open Source foundation of WordPress would provide incredible opportunities for businesses to be built. When I founded Automattic about 5 years ago it was the first attempt in our community to do that in a large, targeted way, starting with anti-spam service Akismet,” said Mullenweg in an interview. “The recent success of the WP premium theme market is just the latest example.”

Anti-spam services are a necessity for online publications. Every time another botnet is taken out, it doesn’t take long for a new one to take its place, and site owners come under a constant barrage of ugly, embarrassing spam that needs to be cleaned off their sites.

Just about every WordPress user runs Akismet, because it’s highly effective and can be used for free, but the company offers plans from $5 up to $100 for businesses, even though they could get away with charging businesses much more for the same service. It’s yet more evidence that Automattic, even as a for-profit company, takes its belief in accessibility and fairness seriously.

Automattic hasn’t once lost sight of the platform that drives its success. “That said, these commercial successes are predicated on the growth and stability of the underlying WordPress platform, and I devote about half my creative energy to improving and accelerating the core platform of WP, and I’d suggest anyone else making their living from WordPress do the same,” said Mullenweg.

Since then, commercial themes started springing up all over the web. Consumers who weren’t interested in the basic — though often quite attractive — free themes could look into the premium options available to them, and the demand for such themes proved to be huge, and only ever growing.

The naysayers in those early days are still remembered for claiming that with so many free themes available, it’s unlikely that any theme business would reach beyond a very specific market segment.

It wasn’t long before Envato, the company who had bootstrapped its way to profitability on the back of marketplaces such as ActiveDen (then FlashDen, before Adobe got antsy about the name) and AudioJungle, saw that there might be something to the whole theme market and set up ThemeForest. ThemeForest is now the biggest WordPress theme retailer on the web.

“The first inkling came when in our closed private beta, which was just for getting people to upload content, we actually started seeing sales. That’s the only private beta where this has happened, so that was a pretty good sign! After a few months of sales, it was clear that WordPress was a very fast grower and of course after a year or so of continuous growth it really became clear just what a great niche it was to be,” said Collis Ta’eed, CEO of Envato and co-founder of the company.

Envato doesn’t make the products sold on ThemeForest themselves — though they have been known to put themes up for sale on the site that were developed for internal projects, such as the old theme for The Netsetter. Its large base of authors drive product development while the company focuses on the platform.

On the other hand, Elegant Themes is a small theme shop where each theme is designed in-house. Like ThemeForest, they saw fast growth, though it took around a year to really take off.

“The business was profitable on day one (that’s not saying much, considering there were no startup costs) and has been growing steadily since inception. It probably took a year or so for it to develop into something that I would call a “real business.” We have experienced some considerable growth in recent months as well, which can probably be attributed to me finally finishing school and dedicating 100% of my time to the site (I have been a full time college student up until a few months ago). Activity on the site has more than doubled in the past year,” said Nick Roach, the shop’s founder.

“What started as a one-man operation 3 years ago has slowly developed into a real team effort. There are currently 10 people that work for Elegant Themes, although this consists of a mix between full and part-time staff. This team manages a quickly-growing member base of 65,000. The area that we allocate the most resources to at the company is tech support.”

As the business has grown, Roach has been able to bring on two full-time developers to get themes coded faster, but he still does all the design work himself. “I think it would be great to bring a new designer on board as well, but this isn’t as high on our priority list. I love to design, and a lack of new theme concepts hasn’t been our bottleneck.”

The GPL Licensing Controversy

The fast growth of the market brought issues with it, and the one that’ll be remembered is the controversy around GPL licensing. The open source camp, spoken for largely by WordPress’ core developers, went head-to-head with theme developers who insisted that GPL licensing would kill their sales.

The contention was that themes were derivatives of WordPress, and thus had to comply with the terms of the GPL license and in turn, license themselves under the GPL. Legal professionals offered varying takes on how that would hold up in a courtroom, with the claims made cloudier by the unhidden agendas of both sides, but we’ll leave it at that: we’re talking about the WordPress economy, not intellectual property law.

Some theme developers even started claiming they would pull out of the market and move on to other platforms, and things came to a head when Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg took the argument to Twitter, which led to a live debate on Mixergy that day.

But Mullenweg, calm, cool and reasoned during the debate, won out when only weeks later, Pearson’s DIY Themes announced that they would adopt the split-GPL license for their flagship product, Thesis.

When I asked Mullenweg for his thoughts on the controversy since it came to a climax during that debate in mid-2010, he said it was done and dusted.

“I think the issue of licensing in the WordPress community is settled — we now have dozens of theme companies making many millions of dollars a year on 100% GPL products, which are just as Free as WordPress itself. I’m excited about this because it shows that business can thrive while still putting users first and protecting their rights and freedoms, which is what Open Source is all about,” said Mullenweg.

Some of the last holdouts to GPL licensing did so on “principle” — or so they claimed — believing that the interpretation of the GPL in this case was wrong. But those who were worried about sales had their fears allayed when they made the switch.

“After we introduced GPL licensing on all code components for WordPress (that is plugins, and the code part of themes), we didn’t see any change in sales at all. This is great as it enabled us to bring our offerings more in line with the WordPress foundation’s aims and to ensure compliance with the WordPress licensing system,” said Ta’eed, whose marketplace requires all users to adopt the split-GPL license. But 100% GPL licensing is on the cards, he says.

“Licensing the code for WordPress themes under the GPL is a requirement for legal compliance, however licensing the entire theme including the design and assets under the GPL is the preference of founder Matt Mullenweg and many in the WordPress community. I’m not sure what the impact would be for Envato’s authors if we moved our marketplaces in that direction, and this is something we are currently reviewing,” said Ta’eed. “The wider implications for the protection of our author’s designs, their ability to include non-GPL items such as icons in their themes, the impact on our other marketplaces and the general author vibe towards such a move are all important considerations for us. And of course we always take into account that as much as is feasible we’d like to stay in the spirit of WordPress as it’s such a fantastic product and community that has enriched so many lives across the web.”

The initial move from proprietary licensing to split-GPL is an easy one, but it’s the move to 100% GPL that gets tricky. Many authors, for instance, use icon sets provided under other licenses in their themes, and thus it’s unlikely that 100% GPL will ever be a completely mandatory license on the marketplace.

Free Software that Generates Jobs

Perhaps one of the things Mullenweg can be most proud of is that his platform and the economy that has developed around it sustains the livelihood of probably hundreds of families and thousands of people, drawing on a wide range of talent in a loyal, dedicated community. Between theme developers who sell their products on marketplaces like ThemeForest, companies that make WordPress products and employ support staff, product managers, developers, designers, lawyers, accountants and more, and Automattic itself, the reach is huge.

When open source loyalists say that their philosophy can change the world, you only need to look as far as WordPress to see that mantra in action.

“It’s very difficult to say how many authors support themselves on marketplace sales because incomes in different countries vary wildly. So while earning a few hundred dollars a month might be enough to get you by in one country, in another it might be less than a week’s wages. Of course some of our authors are earning figures in the tens of thousands of dollars a month, and in any country that is a very comfortable living!” said Ta’eed.

“I’d say over a hundred people making their living would be a fair guess. We have eighty authors and counting in our Elite Author program which is for authors who have sold over $75,000, and that sounds like more than enough to get by! It’s easy to see that many of the top authors on the Envato Marketplaces are WordPress theme and plugin authors. It’s a fantastic market with huge potential and certainly an area that still has more room to see even more authors earning great paychecks.”

Of course, Ta’eed is talking about marketplace authors only: that’s not counting the dozens of staff and hundreds of contractors that Envato employees.

How to Get Started Earning with WordPress

With such a rapidly-growing economy and room for more players, I’d be surprised if you’d made it this far in the piece without thinking about how you can get in on the action yourself.

There are some basics you’ll need: enough PHP knowledge and understanding of WordPress and its theme hooks to code a theme and some design chops for theme development, or stronger knowledge of PHP and WordPress if you want to get into plugin development. But beyond the obvious prerequisites, Mullenweg, Ta’eed and Roach have some thoughts that may help newbies bust into a competitive market.

“I think the next big trends will be around customization and social. Many people are finally stretching out and finding their voice online with the power and flexibility of WordPress but still have sites that look like many others out there. Every WordPress user deserves a site as unique and beautiful as they are,” said Mullenweg, indicating that those looking to get in at the start of the next wave of big sellers should focus on such features.

“Social still doesn’t match search engines as a means of distribution for blogs, but it’s growing. There are very interesting things in the pipeline from WordPress.com, Facebook, Twitter, and Gravatar that build bridges between the islands of blogs.” Mullenweg won’t say what exactly is coming down the pipes at Automattic, but he says that there are interesting plans this year that will impact the way theme developers do business.

Ta’eed indicates that there’s a growing market that hasn’t been saturated so much as theme development, and that’s plugins. Given that themes are usually design vehicles for features that are already in the WordPress codebase, it’s no surprise that there’s less competition in the premium plugin world — the level of programming proficiency required for plugin development is greater.

“While themes have been a huge driver for the WordPress economy, plugins are certainly not to be ignored. There are some very impressive companies who have built up around WordPress plugins, one such example is GravityForms who sell a wonderful plugin for making forms of all varieties on WordPress,” says Ta’eed. “For us at Envato, the CodeCanyon marketplace which originally just offered PHP scripts and Javascript code for sale, was really jumpstarted by the introduction of WordPress plugins. The top plugin on our sites rivals some of the top WordPress themes.”

Despite running his own theme store, Nick Roach says that marketplaces are a great way to start out and test your abilities.

“I think that ThemeForest is a great place to start. The barrier to entry is non-existent and benefits are almost immediate (assuming you are a good designer!). It can also be used as a starting point before later transitioning into your own separate company. Starting your own business from scratch, on the other hand, is a slow and potentially heart-breaking process, but with that risk comes the reward of creating something much more exciting and fulfilling,” he says. ”I think there is still plenty of room in the market for new theme shops, and I would encourage people that have an entrepreneurial spirit to act on it. Just be sure that you love what you do, because bootstrapping a new company isn’t going to be quick or easy.”

Roach may surprise some when he suggests that the number one area of focus isn’t, in fact, design or code — though that’s not to say you can get away with ugly designs or poor code, which is evident when you look at the shop’s gorgeous offerings.

“If I were to give one piece of advice to theme developers who are thinking about starting their own business, it would be to really focus on providing quality tech support to their customers. There is a reason that our “theme development” company has 7 people doing tech support and only 2 people actually “developing” themes. Building your own community is your chance to turn customers into fans — something that is much more difficult to do on sites like ThemeForest, which has lead to rather disparate support systems on and off the site.”

7 out of 10 of Roach’s staff are dedicated to customer support, and the man himself spends half of his workday digging into support queries and questions from potential customers, which keeps him in touch with the needs and concerns of his users.

And a final piece of advice from Roach suggests that those looking to develop their own theme shops should strongly consider a subscription model over individual theme sales.

“The longevity of a theme is highly dependent on constant updates and improvements. These aren’t static HTML templates, and they need to be updated as WordPress evolves. If a theme company that relies on one-time purchase starts to see a declined in business, then their ability to update and improve old themes becomes hindered as their resources decline,” he says.

“This could potentially leave a lot of their users with buggy, unusable themes – especially if they end up going out of business completely. With the subscription model, on the other hand, there is always happy relationship between the customer and the developer. The only reason to update the themes is if people are using them, and if people are using them then they are active, paying members. This means that as long as people are willing to pay, they can rest easy knowing that our themes will continue to work flawlessly, forever.”

With WordPress theme, plugin and service sales up across the board in 2011, it’s sure to be an interesting year. More and more people are getting into the game, and competition might mean developers have to fight harder for each sale, but it also drives innovation. And innovation in online publishing is what WordPress is all about.

via thenextweb.com

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Heuristics, Important Topics and Salience

Will Facebook Kill Google With This?

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Caveats, Carefully Considered

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