August 11, 2011

You can now post images and photos directly to Twitter.com

Look what just popped up on my Twitter profile when I visited via the Web today — you can now share a photo directly through Twitter by uploading your photos to Twitter.com instead of through TwitPic, yfrog, Twitgoo or img.ly. I wonder how this will affect the third-party providers. The image hosting back end is provided by Photobucket, one of the largest photo hosting sites, which is an interesting partnership.

Here’s the scoop straight from the source:

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February 2, 2011

Social businesses: Glimmers of a macro trend

Social Business Design (CC image by Dachis Group)

Annual look at the best strategies, tactics, case studies & insights in the enterprise space

Compared to 2009 and 2008, the past year was a relatively calm one because the amplitude of market gyrations clearly diminished and businesses began to find a new floor on which to build stakeholder expectations. Although I watched with high interest the unfolding financial drama in Europe, I didn’t have the time to conduct the research necessary to do a rigorous interpretation, although I published a brief reflection last week. The big story of the past year was this: 2010 marked a turning point in the adoption of social technologies and in the recognition that analysis and strategy are necessary to achieve consistent results with social initiatives.

Macro trends: Moving from broadcast to relationship building

Until recently, being on Facebook was an end in itself, agencies produced vapid content and little interaction occurred because people rarely interact when brands are talking at them instead of listening

Social has been in adolescence until recently — “being on Facebook” was an end in itself, agencies produced vapid content and little interaction happened because people rarely interact when brands are talking at them instead of listening. People feel it when a brand is interested in using social tools to promote itself. They also feel it when a brand is interested in building relationship, which is marked by active listening and responding, along with a relative absence of self-promotion. Brands that build relationship learn that they don’t have to try so hard to promote themselves: when they are truly interested in people, people will promote them. However, this approach remains a future state for most companies. Relationships take serious work — thus, a need for a strategy.

The growing use of strategy is also a harbinger for what I call “social business” (a step beyond social media), in which leaders use social technologies to transform their businesses by collaborating openly with various outside and inside stakeholders to innovate constantly. Early movers will begin emerging this year: Only a few gutsy players will aggressively adopt social business practices in 2011. I believe they can change markets.

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February 23, 2010

17 visionaries predict impact of social on the enterprise

Nicholas de Wolff, National Film Festival for Talented Youth:
“Too many people are diving into the Web 2.0 and 3.0 pools
before they even know with whom they are swimming.”

Social business seen as making seismic waves in marketing, sales, operations

The adoption of Web 2.0 and social networking accelerated significantly over the past year, and it shows no sign of stopping. Global digital word of mouth is disrupting growing swaths of business models, and CEOs want to understand its opportunities and threats. Although the Web is resplendent with prognostications from social media gurus, the voices of enterprise practitioners are too rarely heard.

To remedy that, I’ve gathered the perspectives of highly experienced executives who share their thoughts on how Web 2.0 is changing their businesses and mindsets. They also share its limitations and problems. Keep in mind that each contributor wrote independently, and I have made no attempt to unify their views, although I will offer my analysis and conclusions as well as the intriguing backstory below. Here is a sampling of the group’s eclectic insights:

A seismic shift in marketing is emergent, and chief marketing officers will require robust strategies to succeed consistently with Web 2.0 and use it to their advantage.
Gamification will redefine “work” and “play” and gradually make them indistinguishable.
Performance demands on government will force it to shed its laggard stereotype and pioneer social business at local and federal levels.
Arguably the biggest disruption of all is that green energy is enabling billions of previously unconnected people to join the world as participants; China and India are two of the fastest growing economies of the world, and millions of people are jumping online every year. Infrastructure limitations are forcing extreme innovation.

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August 20, 2009

Social networks: 8 ways to engage users with news

View more presentations from JD Lasica.

Here’s a slightly revised version of the Social Networks: Engaging Users With News webinar I gave to a few hundred virtual attendees when I flew out to the Poynter Institute in Florida in May.

The slideshow offers eight different areas of social networking that news publishers — anyone from a single individual to a full newsroom — can leverage to engage people around news events in a more robust, interactive way. Specifically:

Blue skies: new approaches to news
Google Map mashups
Instant social networks
Geocoding and citizen photography
The awesomeness of Twitter
Widgets: tapping into local conversations
Facebook & the news
Community video

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August 10, 2009

A chat with the co-founder of FriendFeed

A chat with the co-founder of FriendFeed from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Today came word that Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, is buying the microblogging service FriendFeed.

This is interesting on a couple of levels. First, it provides further proof that Twitter — the microblogging platform that has taken the world by storm this year — is truly not for sale. Second, it ratchets up the faceoff between Facebook and Google for supremacy in the social networking space. The four co-founders of FriendFeed are all ex-Google employees. Co-founder Paul Buchheit (above), whom I interviewed a few weeks ago at the UGCX conference in San Jose, was the creator and lead developer of Gmail. He also suggested Google’s now-famous motto “Don’t be evil” in a 2000 meeting on company values according to Wikipedia

In this 10-minute interview, a relaxed Buchheit talks about the company’s origins and launch in October 2007 from the very simple idea of “letting me know what’s going on with my friends” (one co-founder came at it from the premise of “friend alerts”).

Early in our talk I asked Paul what differentiated FriendFeed from Facebooks’s personalized news stream and from Twitter. He said that FriendFeed tends to be more content- and communication-oriented, encouraging people to share tidbits about what’s going on with them, instead of alerting people what Facebook group they’d joined or whether they’d been bitten by a zombie.

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FriendFeed’s premise is quite similar to Twitter’s, and I should have asked Paul about how Twitter has successfully leveraged an outside developer community by letting coders build applications on top of its platform — and why FriendFeed hasn’t taken a similar approach. But we did get into some of the differences between the two services. I like how FriendFeed threads discussions, in a way similar to forums and bulletin boards, letting people chime in on interesting conversations and providing some context. You can also “Like” a posted item, which is an easy way of conveying your approval.

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