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.

Recently Prime Visibility (PrimeVisibility.com), a rapidly growing integrated online marketing company specializing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC), released a study showing which presidential candidate was most preferred by social media sites.

Sites such as bookmarking (digg, del.icio.us), video (YouTube, MetaCafe), widgets, podcasts, image/photo-sharing services (Flickr, Photobucket), social networking (MySpace, Facebook), social knowledge (Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia), directory submissions (Google Directory, DMOZ) and online reputation management (ORM) were monitored.

Results showed that through Oct 17th Obama was leading 20 of the 43 sites monitored, McCain led three, and both tied in one site.

The two candidates tied on Yahoo, which had over 1.1 billion comments each.

Obama won on Google Blog Search with approximately 227.7 million comments versus 93.2 million for McCain, while Google search produced 201 million page views for Obama versus 141 million for McCain.

In the following video clip, Barack talks about his use of social media and how internet volunteers helped his campaign succeed in many states.

This recent study shows the power of the web and how candidates can no longer discount the need to leverage social media in their campaigns. Tomorrow’s election results could potentially validate if a win in cyberspace could be a good indicator of a true election win.

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

Recently, Appssavvy, a social media company that connects advertisers with social networks, secured $3.1 million in funding. Appssavvy claims they provide a platform that that lets advertisers launch advertising campaigns on popular social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and hi5.

In total they suggest that their platform can help marketers market to 50 million users and not have to worry about dealing with different vendors for multiple social networking platforms.

Some example of the work they have done includes building Facebook applications or helping advertisers sponsor existing applications. Here are a few of their projects:

Kohl’s Back to School Custom Application in Facebook

VO5 Ultimate Flirt Custom Application

Startship Troopers 3 Armies Sponsorship

The 2 Coreys - A&E Mesmo Sponsorship

My Boys - TBS Mesmo Sponsorship

Made of Honor Wedding Book Sponsorship

Funding social media companies even in a down turn market makes sense. Consumers today are spending more and more time on social media sites. Recent studies show how people are now spending more time on social networking sites than on pornography sites, which have been for a long time the second most sought after content on the web. Also, marketers are realizing the value of social media and many plan to reduce their spending on traditional media and focus more on social. As economic times get worse, companies will be looking at spending less and finding ways to reach their target audience at lower costs and social media is a perfect venue for such targeted lower cost marketing investment.

So in my opinion social media marketing spending will continue to grow in a down turn market and Appssavvy one of many companies positioning themselves to be successful in this down turn market.

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.

Commcraft has done a great job in explaining Social Media in a simple and creative way in the above video. They compare social media to ice cream and how many people and companies can make their own ice cream and benefit from other’s creations. Their analogy describes popular social media technologies such as syndication, ratings, tagging, reviews, blogs, wikis, video, and podcasts.Their video already had been watched by over 61,000 people and can be purchases for distribution. Vendors trying to sell social media products or services can purchase this video and add their own logo or message to the video. Other social media related videos, published by Commcraft, include:

1. Podcasting in Plain English
2. Twitter in Plain English
3. Wikis in Plain English
4. Video: RSS in Plain English
5. Social Networking in Plain English
6. Online Photo Sharing in Plain English

If you are trying to explain social media to a colleague, boss, or customer these may be a very quick and media centric way of explaining social media and its features.

Should your business blog or not blog? Is blogging just a fad and when will it go away. IDC predicts that user generated content will grow to become the dominant type of content in the digital universe, with more than 70% of the content being user generated. The numbers prove IDC’s forecast, in 2007 Technorati published a blog citing the growth of blogs. Some of the highlights include:

Blogging is more than a trend, companies need to learn how to blog. Customers want to hear from companies. Business Week published some of the benefits blogging can provide companies:

1. Blogs are a great way to introduce new products and services to visitors without recoding.
2. Blogs are a great way to generate repeat traffic – pure gold.
3. Blogs tell you what customers like and don’t like – first-hand market research.
4. A blog is a great way to keep product reviews in front of your buyers.
5. A blog entry can be easily syndicated to other sites – all pointing back to your site.
6. A blog is easy to set up, easy to maintain.
7. Search engines love blogs. Tips for gaining traffic are included in our article “SEO Your Blog“.
8. A blog keeps your site fresh.
9. A blog has become part of visitors’ expectations.
10. A blog is lots of fun.

For those that want to get started, I recently read Chris Brogan’s article on 50 Steps to Establishing a Consistent Social Media Practice.

I thought he gave some great tips that could be applied for companies who want to start their own blogs. Here are some of the points I found most useful from his blog:

1. If you’re blogging, make that a home base for all your other efforts.
2. Pick 3 social networks to join based on where your customers might be. 3 might sound like too few, but it probably will be too many.
3. On those networks and on your “passport” accounts, make sure you link everything back to the blog.
4. Get a second (maybe even a 3rd) person in the company to build accounts on these places. Nice to have backups, in case you get busy.
5. Build an editorial calendar to think about your posting schedule and subject matter.
6. Subscribe to 50 or more blogs in a similar space as yours, including competitors, and any industry blogs.
7. On all your presence points, be human, and write a human-sounding profile. Use a human-seeming profile picture. (Did I mention “human?”)
8. After you’ve written your first blog post, take some time to comment on some of those 50 blogs, but NOT about your first post.
9. Make sure it’s easy for people to subscribe to your blog, via a reader and also via email.
10. Run periodic checks of your blog/site using Website Grader to see if you’re technically sound and findable.
11. Use tagging and other metadata to improve your blog’s search features. Most newer blog software has this built in. If not, look for plugins.
12. For whatever reason, graphics in posts improve audience. Check out Flickr’s Creative Commons pool for how to use which kinds of graphics appropriately.
13. Consider a nice clean theme for your blog’s design. There are many free themes for different blogs, and some inexpensive ones like Thesis that are worth every penny.
14. Outside of your blog, be sure to update/refresh the information on your social networks every two or three weeks. USE the networks more often, but refresh your profiles and other info.
15. Seek out opportunities to guest post on more popular blogs in your space. Don’t be spammy and over-link to your own site/posts. Add value.
16. On social networks, look for ways to contribute, even when it’s not directly related to your company/product.
17. Continue building relationships outside of having a specific need. Don’t ONLY try to build relationships with customers, for example.
18. To create consistent content, read daily, and not just for your industry. Skim, synthesize, and post.
19. Use notepad files to jot post ideas down when you don’t have a moment to write. Return frequently.
20. Riff off other blog posts you like, and add some value beyond linking back to those original posts (and always link back to those posts).
21. Go to the grocery store news stand and find popular magazines. Convert their story titles to blog post titles for your field.
22. Skim news aggregator sites like Reddit or Digg (or what’s appropriate to your industry), and create posts from there.
23. Ask your audience what they need, what they’re struggling with.
24. Revisit a month of posts and see what you’ve covered the least.
25. Think about things your customers/stakeholders/prospects might need and write about that, even if it’s a bit off-topic.
26. Check your stats to see what people are searching for, and address it.
27. Branch out your blogging into video and audio where appropriate.
28. Look into building a community platform around your content platform.
29. Invite your audience in to guest post where appropriate.
30. Add social bookmarking plugins like Add This to your blog to improve distribution.
31. Look for cross-promotional opportunities for like-minded blogs in your space.
32. Consider starting groups on your social networks (such as a Facebook group) to further discuss the space you’re covering.
33. Remember to comment on other people’s blogs frequently, and show your participation in the communities where you have presence.
34. Occasionally produce PDF versions of your better posts and email them to customers and prospects to encourage growing your audience.
35. Consider a conversion engine like a free offer to help sort prospects from fans and audience.
36. Move towards measurements quickly, as these are often where companies decide their vote.
37. Create a simple report on how you will report what you’re doing for upper management.
38. Work out which numbers might matter. Comments received. Links in. Times bookmarked?
39. Rank each blog post on effectiveness based on your own criteria. Review weekly and monthly.
40. Figure out a “downstream” metric that drives real business value. Reduce costs to call center? Sales leads?
41. Never count # of friends or # of followers as a valuable metric. It’s quality in that case.
42. As soon as you can, find ways to tie your numbers to marketing and sales numbers where appropriate.
43. Move to automate the numbers collection parts early. Keep the sentiment reporting parts human.
44. Set 3 month goals to review progress with upper management. Determine if this is having any impact.
45. Though these last 10 tips are about numbers, NEVER treat people like numbers in social media.

A simple search can provide you with several success stories of niche blogs. One of those is the story of Ken Savage who was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes and in a effort two learn more about the disease he started a blog called BattleDiabetes.com.

BattleDiabetes.com attracts over 7,000 to 9,000 pageviews on a given day and brought in almost $40,000 a year in supplemental income from online advertisement.

If Ken can do it, why can’t your company start blogging and benefiting from this new social media channel? Just Blog!

Most of you are already familiar with the explosive reaction that you get by adding both Mentos and Diet Coke.  For those that are no, you should take a look at the video below:

In the summer of 2006, entertainment site eepybird.com released a video showing what happens when Mendos candies react with Diet Coke.  The resulting “geyser” video spread virally, gerating thousands of views each hour and passing the 3 million mark within a few months and to date the video has been viewed 6,835,462 times.

Since the release of the first video, Mentos was quick to capitalise on this publiscity and shipped eepybird free cases of Mentos for further experimentation.  Also, they sponsored the “Make Your Own Mentos Geyser” competitions.  Which also created additional viral spread of videos and today in YouTube over 1790 mentos and diet coke videos exist.

In 2006, Mentos sales went up 20% - the highest increase in the company’s history. Mentos is a good example of a company who immediately reacted positively to an opportunity to gain free publicity and leveraged the publicity to not only help create more publicity, but also drive to record sales.

I believe the take home lesson for marketers is that we always have to be listening and staying attentive to how people are using and marketing our brands.  By listening and observing we may be able to catch a trend that will allow us to get free publicity and sales.  Mentos was listening and capitalized, why shouldn’t you do the same?

The pace of technology innovation has outpaced IT’s ability to deliver what their customers expect.  Recent surveys by Gartner, Forrester, and McKinsey clearly show how business users are favoring technologies that do not depend on IT. A recent survey conducted by Gartner shows that 30% of users are unhappy with the slow rate of IT change at their companies and this number is suppose to climb to 50% by 2013.

Forrester surveyed marketing managers and 70% of marketing managers were unhappy with their IT departments and preferred to rely on a marketing service provider or consulting organization to help them build and manage their systems.

IT’s lack of resources and ability to adapt to change and to new technologies is also captured in the growth of SAAS deployments over the next few years.  Recent research by Gartner shows how customers spent $1.7 billion on content, social software, and collaboration SAAS based tools in 2007.  The number jumps to $3.6 billion by 2011.  That is a 25.9% growth rate.  It is also the same is the same for CRM, the SAAS CRM market has grown from $1 billion in 2007 to $2.4 by 2011.

Just in the social software market alone 80% of the vendors are SAAS or hosted.   On premise solution vendors cannot catch-up with the speed of change and have become the minority.

A study by McKinsey shows how CIO’s are adapting to meet their customers demands, and they are seriously considering different options.

In 2006, 38% of CIO’s considered adopting SaaS and today the number has jumped to 61%.IT departments will need to change to stay ahead.  SAAS is likely to be the next big trend for IT departments who are trying to cope with their overwhelming user needs.  In the end the customer will prevail.  They will do this with or without IT, and IT better change in order to continue to stay relevant.