Last night I had the pleasure—and fun—of being part of the Networking in the Social Age event hosted by Monster’s new BeKnown Network. It was moderated by Matt Cooney, Social Media Manager at Monster and, I’m happy to note, my former student. Joining me on the panel was a group of young, talented, social media pros: Ryan Paugh, Chief of Staff of the Young Entrepreneur Council, Brent Turner, CTO and VP Product Development at MIT’s Technology Review and Kristen Haley, Social Media Producer for Beantown Social. All of them are experienced in several aspects of the social media world and deeply engaged in it. The panel discussion was live-streamed on the BeKnown Network and I expect it to be archived there soon.
The discussion provided a lot of interesting insights. The most compelling one for me was the sense that, while the large social networks have their place, smaller and more intimate communities may be the wave of the future. Whether it’s a closed Facebook page, or a professional group on LinkedIn—open or closed—or whether it’s a community on any platform of people who are passionate about a subject, these smaller communities have a lot to offer both personally and professionally. @profstrahler Tweeted during the live stream and he pointed out some of the other high points. Thanks, Doug!
It was a good event, the first of many by this new network, I hope. I’ve always worked to help my students prepare for their job searches and career development; having a resource like BeKnown should be a real asset. Take a look at their mission statement on the sidebar of the event notice. Expanding the notion of job search to one of career management that helps people improve their lives is a great vision. The tight integration of the network with Facebook is going to provide a lot of opportunity. The BeKnown landing page has a great video introduction; it is an interesting perspective on merging your personal and professional communications and still controlling messages so they are directed to only the people you want to receive them. Of course they have a mobile app so you can do this on the go, and do it in many languages. Fascinating concept!
I look forward to watching this develop and seeing ways it can benefit today’s students and young professionals. Good going!
A student recently posted this link with an interesting application of Google Wave—thanks, Jeff! It reminded me that I needed to try to understand this new Google product. It’s still in preview, not yet in publicly-available beta, so if you want to try it, you have to request an invitation. As of mid-December Mashable said there were about a million users. The slow rollout limits the usefulness of a collaborative tool, but there’s quite a bit of buzz on the web about bugs and general difficulty of use. “Take it easy” seems to be a reasonable approach and Google makes it clear that they will get invitations out as they think the system is ready. In Google-speak Wave is “equal parts conversation and document,” it is completely shared with all participants, and it takes place in real time. Google’s Dr. Wave explains and demonstrates. The video is better on the Google site, where it’s embedded in a use example (clever of them!), than on YouTube where you can’t see what “Dr. Wave” is pointing at. Here’s a more fully populated example from Mashable. Mashable people have written extensively about Wave, although the link to their Complete Guide is broken at this writing.
Google says Wave can be used to arrange events, collaborate on projects, share photos, share meeting notes, brainstorm and play interactive games. Ok, but that’s not only generic, it’s more consumer than business oriented. Howard Greenstein has an excellent post on Mashable. It suggests potential business uses and gives a hypothetical example of a team preparing a client pitch from multiple locations. His conceptualization of modes of use is especially helpful, and there are other useful links at the bottom of the post.
Can Wave replace email and other collaborative tools like wikis? That’s not yet clear, but it’s clearly worth keeping an eye on—perhaps giving it a trial when it becomes more widely available!
It’s no secret that I think apps are the future, and we can see it emerging now. However, I’m not a big mall shopper, so I haven’t experimented with shopping apps for my iPhone except for a grocery list, which I quickly became unable to live without. My students are on the same wave length. In fact, last night one tried to convince the class that we wanted to listen to sports events on our smart phones! No sale there, Laura! but I was thinking about apps when I saw this article in the NYT today. The idea of mobile phones as an essential tool for shopping intrigues me, although it may strike fear into the hearts of some retailers.
The video is fascinating, so I decided to experiment. I downloaded the free ShopSavvy app with no trouble. However, it didn’t work. Ok, go read some more. I found out that it only works on the iPhone 3Gs. Reason: older iPhones lack the autofocus function that makes a bar code readable.
Is there a bar code scanner app for the 3G? Yes, I found RedLaser and it looked pretty good. I downloaded that, although along the way I had to update my iPhone software; that took longer than the two app downloads together. After that, $1.99 and a few seconds later, I had a bar code scanner.
First thing I tried was a Diet Coke can. The UPC is on the side, so the can kept rolling around and getting glare from the metal; never did get it to work. However, I pointed the scanner at the bar code on the RedLaser site, and moments later I had lift off! The code is for a snuggles blanket and it sells for as little as $11.99 online and shows $14.99 at both Best Buy and Sears, which are near me. And I didn’t need to try to integrate it with the ShopSavvy app; it gave me results from Google search and from the Find. Fascinating!
Thank goodness I’ve finished my Christmas shopping, but I decided to check how well I did on one item. The hard drive I bought sells for as little as $109.95 online and as much as $179.99 at retail outlets and some online merchants. So I did just fine—thanks to a sale and loyal customer discount at Staples! Are you surprised at the price range? I was! Of course, customers will think about shipping when they see the online prices. Does this kind of shopping confirm the wisdom of all the free shipping offers we are seeing this holiday season?
This is all pretty new, and not that many shoppers are yet using it. What about next Christmas? Fearless Roberts prediction; this is going to catch on fast. Corollary to that; if I can do it, anyone else with a smart phone can!
Retailers, both online and off, seem to have two choices. They can offer to meet the lowest price; notice that Wal-Mart’s price matching offer (current TV ad appears to simply restate the policy on their site) excludes online prices. That obviously can cut into a retailer’s margin—and what if it’s counter to the merchandising strategy?
I would describe the second option as, “you can’t beat them, so join them.” I’ve previously described apps intended to make it easier to shop at certain stores or buy certain brands. That is going to make sense, at least for first movers for awhile. Like everything else, however, there will be a limit to how many apps customers want.
Is this within range of small local retailers? I searched again and found this site; the costs are consistent with what I’ve seen before and on the low end are not excessive.
Should retailers—large and small—be thinking right now about next Christmas and how they can take advantage of the trend to mobile-assisted shopping?
This article about widgets—and the wonderful quote from Charlene Li—in CNET news caught my attention. I use widgets on my various blogs and I think they’re great. As a user, I see a lot of potential applications for them, so when CNET suggested they are losing favor, I read with interest.
The gist of the argument is that widgets haven’t been the silver bullet for reaching target audiences on social networks. Some makers are adopting the term “social applications” in an effort to suggest a broader, more profitable scope for development activity.
I’m always interested in what Google finds on these subjects, so I searched both terms. Both on the web search and the news search, there’s lots of current activity under both terms. Interestingly enough, Google’s Open Social is a major feature on the social applications searches. I did find a post on O’Reilly’s Radar blog that talks about domain-specific social applications that is thought provoking, especially to those interested in branded content. The results on widgets are much more diverse in terms of companies mentioned and types of subject matter. Here are the definitions offered by CNET:
Technically, industry executives differentiate between widgets as a piece of self-contained code that can be embedded to a page and contain content, for example, photo slideshows. Applications are also embeddable software but they're inherently social and interactive, e.g., embedded videos forwarded from friends, executives say.
Does that help tell them apart? It doesn’t do much for me.
Without the search, I wouldn’t have quickly seen today’s announcement on Yahoo’s TV “widget channel.” They are partnering with Intel to distribute widgets through Intel’s set-top boxes. According to the Yahoo page they are going to “bring your favorite Yahoo! Services to TV.” This includes sports, news, weather and finance channels as well as the ability to display your Flickr® photos, as shown on the graphic. I’ve superimposed a section from their Connected TV page that defines the concept. That’s an interesting development, but I’ve strayed from my original question: is it widgets or is it social applications?
Let me give a cynical take on this semantic issue. If there’s a clear way to monetize it—and there’s an obvious opportunity for Yahoo to sell advertising on these new channels—then it’s fine to call it a widget. If it’s a cool app in search of a revenue stream, maybe it needs a more impressive appellation.
It’s not the name that makes a difference. It’s what the application can accomplish; take Facebook’s Super Wall (developed by RockYou but being taken over by Facebook) or Circle of Friends (Bantr) apps, for example. They are great apps with millions of users. But monetization is an issue for the developers (as spam was apparently a major issue with RockYou’s version of Super Wall) and marketers don’t have an obvious way to take advantage of all these users.
Don’t let the semantics issues obscure the strategic ones!
