Collaboration Cast

Rock You (www.rockyou.com) a company that develops social media applications including a multimedia slideshow creation tool popular on Facebook and MySpace has secured $17 million in series C funding. To date they have secured $52 million in funding.

The funds will primarily help Rock You develop applications for PC and mobile devices in Asia-Pacific. They also plan to open new offices in New York, Los Angeles and Detroit, and look for potential acquisitions.

The funding of Rock You at this time validates that social media is mainstream and has great potential not only in the US, but internationally. The Asia-Pacific market is a hot bed for social media and social media companies should seek alternative global markets that are still growing.

This email recently went out to Jive Employees:

As Jive finds it necessary to lay off 1/3 of its staff, Vignette welcomes the Jive team to check out our job postings and consider a career at a company that is investing, and will continue to invest, in a long-term Social strategy.

Vignette is financially strong and can weather these difficult economic times.  We are based in Austin, Texas one the best places to live in the United  States.

 In addition to our focus on social software, Vignette provides a comprehensive suite of web experience management products, which will give you a lot of opportunity to work with many technologies that are defining  the future of the web.

Let us know if you are interested.  We are always looking for top talent that is experienced in the social space.

Sincerely,

Dave Dutch

Sr. Vice President of Products and Marketing

The number of social media companies keep growing.  H2O New Media is just another recent entrant.  H2O Media is based in Dubai and was launched 6 months ago.  To date they have 40 customers across different countries.  Some of these include:  Al Maya Group, Sian, Strawberry PR & Event, CMPI Exhibitions, CSM, Zaman, Euro RSG, the American Business Council to name just a few.

H2O plans to compete with other social media leaders such as Mzinga and Awarness.  Companies whose valuations excess US$300 million.

A main difference between H2O and their competitors is that H2O plans to open source it’s technology, while selling a SAAS based version of its application.

As demonstrated by H2O, the social media market is growing, while the competition is going to continue to get steep.

Ed Morgan, a consultant for Deloitte, recently completed a study of more than 100 business who have invested in online communities.  One of the key discoveries in this study is that many of the online communities started have failed to gain traction with customers.  Specifically 35% of the 100 online communities started had less than 100 members and less than 25% have more than 1,000 members.Some of the key reasons for failure include:

 1. Failure to Think About the Customer First - When companies invest in communities they think about what is in it for them and forget to focus on customer needs and wants.  Companies who focus on their needs first, end up launching products that customers do not want to use.

2. Technology was the First Priority - Some companies approach online communities by thinking about the technology problem first and spending all their money to address this problem, verses thinking about marketing and content that will help the community become attractive and grow.

3. Inexperienced and Under Resourced - Marketing departments spend money deploying and marketing a community, but when it comes to the day-to-day management, they only allocate a part-time inexperienced resource to managing a community.   30% of the business Deloitte studied have only one part-time worker in charge of their communities.

4. Lack of Success Metric Development - A majority of communities measure success by the number of visitors.  Although, this is a good metrics, it does not match-up to original community goals such as word-of-mouth marketing and community loyalty.  Better metrics may help better determine if a community is successful and what could be done to increase the chances for success.

As companies look into deploying a community, they need to make sure they understand their goals, how they want to track success, and what is needed to attain success.  Companies need to start thinking about the why first and then think about the how.  They should not make this a technology project, but a marketing initiative.  Finally, companies need to ensure that they have a experienced community manager in charge of driving a communities success.  By thinking about some of the strategic and positioning issues ahead of time and resourcing the community will for sure help increase success rates.