Twitter's paradigm shift

The original paradigm for twitter was for users to tell others what they are doing in real time. For the most part, the new paradigm for twitter is for users to send out a broadcast message of thought snippets, rendez-vous with GPS coordinates or gossip to casual acquaintances or friends of friends. Many celebrities do not twitter themselves, but use hired hands to promote their persona. In short, Twitter has become more of a medium of conversation, a big after-dinner party where everyone keeps a watchful eye and ear of their surroundings albeit discreetly and not always in tune.

Twitter has kept some similarities with blogging. For example, less than 20 percent of Twitter users create content for the other 80 percent. In addition, like blogs, Twitter is appealing to large corporations as a new channel to reach digitally savvy customers. Blogs reach customers through online ads and corporate branding through corporate blogs. How does twitter help corporations since there is no advertising. Well corporations are using twitter in different ways, such as getting immediate feedback from partners and customers on a new product or service before launching them in the real marketplace.

Therefore, despite any new advances in applications on smartphones, Titter will keep its place as a broadcast medium whether for the individual or the corporation. This paradigm shift has already begun. In conclusion, Twitter will remain as a low cost and effective messaging platform. This fits into an environment with ever growing volume of content yet ever shorter attention spans.

Expanding Your Blog Audience

Ping Servers allow users to locate your blog more easily by updating search engines dedicated to blogs.

To this end, there are two valuable services that allow you to expand your blog audience. The first is Ping-o-matic. This service is free, very easy to use and connects to many other ping servers and a real time saver. The other place to add your blog url to is the Google Blog Search. Since Google owns Blogger it is highly likely that Goggle is already indexing your site adequately.

Finally, it is good practice to use product or service specific words. Therefore, sales people and colleagues interested in these products or services will find you and want to chat or collaborate with you.

There are a number of services that allow enterprises to monitor what the blogosphere is saying about them, namely Nielsen Buzzmetrics - Blogpulse, Radian 6 - Radian6, Cymphony - Influence 2.0 and Techrigy - SM2. If you are looking for a global player your best bet is Nielsen Buzzmetrics, they have offices around the world.

Building Blocks to Enterprise 2.0

I highly recommend the book titled Enterprise 2.0 Implementation from authors Newman and Thomas. This book covers not only the technology, but the cultural changes an enterprise must have to implement web 2.0 internally.

Some of the short-term goals an enterprise seeks to attain after implementing web 2.0 is a substantial reduction in intra-company email, greater communication with customers, greater collaboration among employees. Over the long term a company can achieve more product innovation from employee collaboration, improved recruitment faster sales cycles and increased customer retention. p.25-26. In terms of the short term goals, I would add a richer communication experience, because web 2.0 technologies facilitate the use of multi-media. In regards to long term goals an enterprise can also improve service innovation in addition to product innovation.

There are several social networking vendors that serve the enterprise such as Awareness, IBM Lotus Connections, Jive Clearspace, Weblingo and Hive Live. p.52-53 & 203. The other option is to try multiple products and only implement the best component from each. For example, Clearspace has terrific Forums and personal profile features. Confluence is great for wikis. One thing that the author fails to mention is the differences between the user experience and the programmers experience. For example, Clearspace Jive software provides terrific user experience, but the backend capabilities are less comprehensive than Atlassian Confluence. The latter provides comprehensive development tools and plugins, but the user interface is much less appealing. In some cases, simply seeing a demo of the product is not enough for evaluating each vendor. The IT department will need to setup a pilot with each vendor and determine the benefits of each product based on the user experience and backend capabilities.

At Cisco many vendors are used that provide the same feature sets, but are deployed in different areas of the business. The vendor that achieves the fastest and greatest adoption levels eventually wins the contract to deploy at the enterprise level. However, if there are more than one software solutions with high levels of adoption, then they continue to co-exist at Cisco. Having an SOA framework allows the company to integrate the services of multiple vendors into multiple legacy systems. The enterprise can reap the benefits of solution diversity with strengths and weaknesses playing out for each software solution. Unfortunately, a major drawback is that senior management is unable to see the entire picture rolled-up into one interface, because there are too many software solutions providing different information.

In short, Cisco is successful with its implementation of web 2.0, because it already has the building blocks in place, such as a service-oriented architecture (SOA) allowing legacy systems to inter-operate. The enterprise can create mashups using rich Internet applications (RIAs) and its legacy systems. The SOA allows information from legacy systems to become discoverable greatly increasing the information within them. Another key component is a rich employee directory that connects to web 2.0 applications. For example, a wiki using the teamphoto macro will show an employee photo and also link to the employee directory where LinkedIn style information is stored.

Attaching social information (such as tagging and voting) to existing enterprise data repositories improves the relevancy of information being searched and used. Another key building block to successful web 2.0 implementation is to have a master data set where the user has a single version of the truth from across a diverse set of applications and repositories. p.82 Some of the web standards to achieve this are Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State transfer (REST). They allow the systems to become inter-operable and web 2.0 enabled.

Another building block needed for successful web 2.0 implementation to to have search 2.0 capability. For example, search 2.0 includes search results with information from blogs, wikis and forums. In addition, the enterprise search has social tagging (folksonomy) added to the search results. Unless the information from blogs wikis and forums is searchable, their value is greatly reduced and user adoption of web 2.0 technologies will inevitably decline. p.81 The authors provide a short list of social bookmarking vendors, namely Scuttle (open-source), Cogenz and Connectbeam.p.142. Other open-source social networking software is available at vivalogo Implementing search 2.0 can be disruptive, because information that was once under tight control can become accessible to all. Therefore, is is a good approach to implement this technology in a phased approach and only target a functional area or division initially. p.114 Using specialized crawlers will allow the marking of information that is deemed too sensitive and remove it from the web 2.0 indexing and authentication.

Source
Enterprise 2.0 Implementation, Aaron C. Newman & Jeremy Thomas, McGraw Hill Publ.,2008, ISBN 978-0-07-159160-7.

Wild West of Advertising in Web 2.0 Era

We are all aware of Amazon's sophisticated product recommendation engine based on a customer's previous behavior. What would happen if Amazon partnered with Google and was able to determine the entire behavior online? Therefore instead of just having data on an individual's purchasing behavior they have insight into their anxieties or dreams based on search patterns? Social networking sites are invading the privacy of their members using a combination of opt-in and/or opt-out principles without oversight. Members of these sites are aware of the attack on their privacy, but many are not.

However, there is a growing number of social networking users that are comfortable with greater openness and are comfortable with sharing their lives online. Some have realized that this information is now accessible to their employers and they sometimes lose hiring opportunities, because some of their personal behaviors displayed online is inappropriate for the employer. This is a growing concern, but for now is left unchecked.

My biggest concern is a cataclysmic event, where the invasion and abuse of privacy is done on a large scale and users/consumers generate a backlash that affects all advertisers. A few years ago Google Earth raised some concerns concerning privacy when users of Google Earth could zoom in on people acting inapropriately. Another similar situation will be location awareness that comes with GPS and mobile devices. Today many online advertisers are sending ads that are location specific. This will raise similar ethical concerns as to the advertiser is aware that you are at a ball game when you should be at work. As more and more of our lives are done online, on mobile devices, on IPTV, YouTube and other emerging media, the more advertisers will peer into our lives with greater accuracy and effectiveness.

So far, advertisers are experimenting with greater access to behavioral and social data online and creating better targeting. However, there are no checks and balances. The only way to stop an advertiser from abusing the use of personal information online is through grassroots awareness at the customer base of social networking sites. My fear is that it is only a matter of time before an unscrupulous marketer merges social networking information with a Google search and GPS information and create a mega database. Can our governments create a do not call list for an information system with tentacles into all parts of our online lives? Facebook was forced to change its policies regarding its beacon program, because of user backlash. In essence user awareness is what made a difference in the advertisers' behavior.

I predict that a growing trend will emerge in the form of new digital privacy protectors. Several non-profit organizations will spring up with the main goal of providing simple social networks that are safe from invasive marketers. People will share their personal information in the form of blogs and videos, but access will be protected and through invitation only. Only non-profits will have the integrity that users seek to share their private information. Online stores will provide access to their products, but personal data will be scrubbed clean before leaving the social network to reach the online retailers. The non-profits will survive with government subsidies or subscription fees or the donation of a large foundation. This new web 2.0 model will occur probably within 10 years, but for the time being the wild west in advertising is upon us.