BOSSdev

Collaborating with a Michigan based coffee chain Biggby Coffee in the city of Madison Heights, Cosmin and Grant from BOSSdev launched the first ever “Breakfast Tweetup” in the Metro Detroit area.

@danielbora – Biggby’s Coffee taking orders.

On Tuesday April 14th from 8am – 10am Twitter users showed up and began chatting things up both face to face along with the occasional tweets to the Twitter “back channel” of #bfastup. All the tweets from the event were displayed via the software Tweetdeck on the 50 inch plasma at Biggby’s, a great synergy of both real and virtual world usage of Twitter to establish professional relationships. Of course also enjoying their favorite coffee, latte’s, and pastries. Some people even posted Tweets of what coffee order they wanted.

There was great conversation, great networking, and above all great coffee to keep us going. Listed below are some of the participants during the event.

@cosguru
@gkravitz
@scottheath
@ruthreaser
@ddelonge
@mollysly
@davemurr
@balanon
@davebenjamin
@k_labudde
@hillsdalesam
@joshyurich
@virtualjason
@danielherdean
@jfavreau
@mruffi
@sullyvan
@sandradeelee
@kaylook
@brian_halicki
@karenevanstm
@danielbora
@kristanabraham

Tweetdeck on plasma screen for all to follow tweets in real time.

A big thank you to all who arrived and also participated even though they were not physically at Biggby’s ( @sazbean, @davepeckens ) The feedback was to continue the event at another date so please be on the lookout for the next Breakfast Tweetup!

Ps. Great recap from @davemurr with video – http://digg.com/u111ZK

More photos from the event:

@joshyurich and @mruffi – “talking”

@virtualjason and @gkravitz

This year we are continuing the seminar/workshop  tour and stopping in the New Jersey/New York area. I am excited to be speaking again with Dave Evans the author of “Social Media Marketing and Hour a Day“. Along with him this time around we will have the Social Media Manger from HP,  Tac Anderson. Looking forward to meeting him for the first time. Of course I cant forget my colleagues at BOSSdev, Korye Logan, Andy McDonnell and Sam Swenson.

We will be focusing on a major pain point for brands and enterprises that are looking for measurement and analytics in their Social Media initiatives. So if you are in the area please feel free to sign up and reserve your seat! More information below:

BOSSdev Social Media Marketing Breakfast

“Social Media Strategy: Achieving Real Results in a Virtual World”

Space is limited

Reserve your seat now

Date: Jan. 29th, 2009

Time: 8:30 AM – 12:30 PM

Location:

Parsippany Hilton
One Hilton Court
Parsippany, NJ 07054
973-267-7373

Social media is here to stay, and it has an enormous effect on the depth and speed that information is disseminated. There’s no denying the powerful influence this has on how companies need to approach communication, collaboration, multimedia, and entertainment.
Social media is the building block of the online world – and the content generated by casual users is expanding faster than any other kind. Those who truly want to succeed need to understand how it all works.

Regarding analytics, it makes sense to want data that proves and validates the impact of social programs. This helps to justify your investment by providing data for ongoing modification to maximize effectiveness.

Now, you can discover advantageous new insights on social media channels through real world case studies along with metrics of results. The next BOSSdev seminar will address these relevant issues – and more – to keep you ahead of the curve when it comes to this potent and expanding force.

Speakers include:

Tac Anderson, Social Media Marketing Manager, Hewlett Packard
Dave Evans, Author of “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day”
Cosmin Ghiurau, Social Media Analyst, BOSSdev
Korye Logan, Digital Marketing Strategist, BOSSdev
Andy McDonnell, Business Development Director, BOSSdev
Sam Swenson, Social Media Analyst, BOSSdev
Justin Wyman, Director, Collective Intellect (Social Media Analytics)

As you see in the screenshot below. I left my browser open to twitter search for approximately 5 minutes and watched as the tweets jumped past 2,500 (it was up over 6,000 15 minutes later!)

Yet another amazing case study of the power of micro-blogging to instantly spread news!

eBooks are an essential part of internet marketing from a standpoint of providing solid information on a given subject matter. eBooks are normally sold throughout the internet marketing world along with free versions that are meant as an additional value to the visitor or potential customer. At this point I also offer 3 ‘free ebooks’ on Social Media to those that subscribe via email to Social Media Core.

It is no secret that most of these free ebooks are written by an author who typically gives the ebook on a non-commercial license in order to share the information and at the same time possible draw traffic back to their website or upsell to another ebook or product.

Most people will search on Google or through time gather a collection of free ebooks. I like to use the social media strategy in having the free ebooks come to me. That is why I use a website called Scribd.com to check on new free ebooks on a given subject matter. In this case Social Media. Lately many have been uploaded to be shared. Of these, I have compiled a list of the current Top 25 free ebooks on Social Media. The order is random as quite honestly I have not read all of them. The 26th free ebook to the reader who reads all of them and gives me their opinion on the actual top order. Note: I have compiled a list of ‘true ebooks’ that are in PDF and Word Doc format.

1. Belonging Networks Corporate Social Networking
2. Social Web Basics
3. The 2009-2014 World Outlook for Advertising for Social Media Web Sites
4. Social Media and Customer Service
5. Center For Social Media – Youth As E-Citizens
6. How Blogs and Social Media are Changing Public Relations
7. Social media and the banking industry
8. Social Media: 40 Places to Find Web 2.0 for Your Web Site
9. Social Media Marketing Strategies Guide
10. Nielsen – Pharma & Social Media
11. The Need for Speed – Using Social Media to Speed Innovation
12. What is Social Media?
13. ComplexDiscovery – User Generated Content, Social Media, and Advertising
14. Social Media Guide Release
15. Social Media & Marketing – Online Networking & Advertising February 2008
16. ebook: The Art and Science of Social Media and Community Relations
17. What is Social Media? – Book 2
18. Social Media Maps
19. Social Media Manifesto by Brian Solis
20. New Media Case Studies 2008
21. The Impact of Social Media on Innovation – Josh Bernoff
22. The Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organisations
23. Customer Service: The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media
24. The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008
25. The Essential Guide to Social Media

That is why companies that specialize in Social platforms for enterprise are sprouting up all over. The leaders among those are the ones that continue to better there business model and product.

I was fortunate to get an email from the PR folks of HiveLive.com to give me an exclusive demo of their product.

HiveLive is different than other companies in their space by the following four points according to their Business Development Director who gave me the demo.

1. Customizable web 2.0 building blocks (known as the hive).
2. Extensive permissions sets
3. Point & Click Interface
4. Partnership Approach

He led me via a remote desktop demo to the following examples:

1. Designers Accord Web Community – http://community.designersaccord.org

2. Serena Software – http://community.serena.com/pages/home

3. Rally Community – http://agilecommons.org/hives

I also got an opportunity to get a demo of the administrative back end which is very flexible and customizable when it comes to the modules and features that are used within a website. Areas of the website are viewable and able to be modified based on the user permissions set to each usergroup and/or individual.

HiveLive Admin area

There is no URL to the admin area but I was shown a default back end admin area to get a feel of the GUI and features.

When it comes to design customizations it is also very flexible via company providing creative assets and HiveLives intergrates it into the soluction. HiveLive is a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. Which means it must be hosted on their servers with URL forwarding/alias from your company’s domain.

I was told that most enterprise companies are understandable of this when I asked about this SaaS being a potential negative to the product especially since if it is a large Fortune company with established brand and security processes in place it may be a deterrant.

As many companies are now adopting SaaS products (Salesforce.com) not allowing an opportunity to deploy on a company enterprise server may not be a problem.

Overall I was impressed with the product and look forward to reviewing others like it.

One of the earliest blog post was by Kristen Nicole over at Mashable.  Where she covers Ping.FM as a place to update your ‘lifestream’. At the time only Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Tumblr and Pownce were supported. Now, Ping.FM supports so many sites that I had to register for a few just to round out my collection of profiles within the social world because with tool, I can actually aggregate all of my accounts and post status’ and blog posts directly from one location. Ping.FM.

What is amazing is the fact that it is still so simple and the functionality is in its infancy, I am curious what additional components they will add to be able to update their social ‘network’ of sites.

Currently the supported sites are:

1. Twitter
2. Facebook
3. Plurk
4. Pownce
5. MySpace
6. LinkedIn
7. Tumblr
8. Identi.ca
9. Brightkite
10. FriendFeed
11. Jaiku
12. Bebo
13. hi5
14. Mashable
15. kwippy
16. Xanga
17. Rejaw
18. Friendster
19. Delicious
20. Yahoo 360
21. Koornk
22. Multiply
23. Yammer
24. Flickr
25. Utterli
26. Blogger
27. Plaxo Pulse
28. LiveJournal
29. WordPress.com
30. Diigo
31. YouAre
32. Custom URL

All of these social networks can be categorized as either:

1. Status Updates
2. Micro-Blogging
3. Blogging

What is great is you can also create a ‘trigger’ which is basically a hashmark type control for specific social sites that have been added to your network. For example, If I want to target only the top micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, Pownce, and Plurk, you can create a trigger #top and select from your list of sites only those three and then when you place your comment you place the trigger at the beginning of the comment and it only updates those three sites.

This is an awesome way to ‘channel’ messages to a certain audience within your network of sites.

Lastly, does a service like Ping.FM have ways to be able to post to all of these outside of logging in to Ping.FM proper? This is the ace card that really got me excited. Ping.FM has methods to allow a user to post from the following channels:

1. AOL Instant Messenger
2. Google Talk (GTalk)
3. Yahoo! Messenger
4. Windows Live Messenger
5. iGoogle Gadget
6. Facebook Application
7. iPhone Web App
8. Mobile App (WAP)
9. Ping through SpinVox

What’s great is this list still is incomplete as I still wish there is a Blackberry application.

Ping.FM is an amazing tool that I believe will catch on like wildfire as there are more and more social network and micro-blogging websites that has various audiences and to have a central dashboard to communicate to all or a specific audience will be an invaluable tool for early adopters and businesses.

I am curious to hear what competitors are out there such as Ping.FM that are similar or better.

So now we are more than a week past the final election week results and Barack Obama is our President Elect and George Bush regrets saying alot of things while in office. What a wild post election week.

I am a non-traditional when it comes to politics, internet, and blogging. I am a conservative Republican.

However, one thing I have admired almost a year ago is how Democrats, Barack Obama exclusively has used the power of the internet, more specifically social media to rally his supporters and influencers. Never before has a campaign leveraged the power of online social communities like Barak Obama. As of today here are some general statistics for some major social sites the Barack Obama campaign has tapped into:

• Facebook Group - Over 3.1 million subscribers
• Myspace Profile – Over 900,000 friends
• Youtube Profile – Over 1,800 videos and 135,000+ subscribers
• Twitter Profile – 128,000 + followers

Why I am bringing up these statistics is the fact that Barack Obama (and the Democrats per se) have a huge crowdsourcing gem on their hands for not only during Barack Obama’s Presidency but for his re-election aspirations in 2012.

Barack Obama is the first president to have the power to leverage Social Media in such a way as never seen before by our Presidency or Government as a whole. Immediately after he won the presidency, he launched the website, CHANGE.GOV – A website dedicated to educating and communicating with the social user.

On the flip side, the Republicans seem to be taking note. I won’t get into how massive the difference in statistics were for John McCain for the website mentioned above, but what I want to mention is that it seems the Republicans are taking note as well by launching their own Social site called REPUBLICANFORAREASON.com

I applaud the Republicans for jumping on the band wagon and understanding the power of Social Media, but I have to admit the massive difference in Social Media Strategy is still massive. Consider the domains themselves used from a marketing standpoint. Change.gov vs. RepublicanForAReason.com – The Republicans just may have added hyphens inbetween words, it would have made the domain easier to remember.

I am excited to see that both parties now are understanding the power of Social Media. Time will tell who will win this campaign of utilizing Social Media to its maximum potential.

If you are a company looking to get the most out of your Social Media strategy, take a look at these companies below:

Mzinga

Mzinga is another company that has emerged on the scene the past few months. I met Jim Storer (Sr. Director Social Media Strategy) at OMMA New York and was thoroughly impressed by their companies current busines model and strategy to social media for enterprise. This was a company which first impressed me on the fact that from the very beginning impression on visiting their company website the seemed to “practice what they preached” when it came to leveraging their own website as a social media tool.

They also were the authors of a first of its kind book called “We are Smarter the Me“. A “crowdsourcing” book that was done pre-company launch. A very smart idea in my opinion. Thank you Jim for handing me a copy.

Company overview from website:

Our company philosophy is built around the idea of pervasive community. Quite simply, we believe that by using social media and Web 2.0 technologies to enable a dialogue with your employees, your customers, your partners, or your enthusiasts—in other words, by threading community throughout the enterprise—you can achieve tangible business results.

Through our combination of highly scalable, enterprise technology, rich domain expertise, and skilled moderation services, we help businesses achieve higher revenues, lower costs, and greater workplace and customer satisfaction.

Jive Software

Jive software has been a mover and shaker within the social media enterprise now for some time as well. I consistency see senior executives of this application development company among various social media webinars and meetups. I am impressed at their founders persistency in developing this enterprise level social media solution.

I am thoroughly impressed by the company culture as a whole based on their gorgeously designed website and user interface.

Company overview from website:

Jive Software makes enterprise social software that reunites employees with each other and connects them with their customers and partners. Our leading products, Clearspace & Clearspace Community, use a people-centric approach to facilitate conversation and solves the problems associated with legacy systems. Jive Software is the market leader in social productivity and community software with more than 2,000 customers and over 15% of the Fortune 500. Jive was founded in 2001 and is located in downtown Portland, Oregon.

Powered

I have followed Powered for a few months now and spoked to some of people who have been associated with this company in one way or another. I have heard positive feedback and in my opinion are one of the leaders in this space.

Company Overview from website:

Powered was founded in 1999 with the goal of using social interaction and consumer education as a new strategy for online marketing. Today’s consumers are increasingly wary of intrusive forms of marketing and sales messages. With the recent explosion of social networks, consumers now have more ways to engage with each other, to share their views, and learn from each other — from entertainment to products to brands. Powered provides a way for consumers to engage with brands on their terms — and in a way that the consumer values, not avoids. Every year, brands using Powered’s social commerce programs reach tens of millions of potential new buyers and convert a significant percentage of them into hundreds of millions of dollars in product sales.

KickApps

KickApps is the top white label solution where a typical user/company can create a social network application with zero knowledge of programming. Their user interface gives anyone the ability to setup a social application.

I personally was part of their Beta testers prior to public beta and began kicking the tires almost immediately. They have a great business model in being able to use their service for Free along with a Premium version.

Company overview from website:

The KickApps hosted, white-label platform puts social media and online video functionality directly into the hands of every web publisher who aspires to be a media mogul and turns every web designer and developer into a social media rockstar! With KickApps, it’s now easier than ever for web publishers to leverage the power of social and rich media experiences on their websites to drive audience growth and engagement.

Community Server

The product by telligent is another social media application product. One that is compliant with Microsoft ASP .Net. Their showcase is quite impressive with such clients as Microsoft Surface, Betty Crocker, Intel, CorelDraw, and more.

I have not heard to much about this company within my socialsphere but that is not to say they are not strong in the social media enterprise space. If there is someone who has worked with this company on some level it would be great to hear from you.

Company overview from website:

Managing knowledge within an organization is a constant challenge. Community Server can help facilitate knowledge retention through its Integrated Mail Server, which enables the forums application to be used like an email discussion list. (The Integrated Mail Server can also be easily integrated with existing email distribution lists, such as those found in Microsoft Exchange Server). Once these email streams are in Community Server, they are immediately available for search, ratings and, RSS subscriptions. Most importantly, they ensure that the data continues to be available long after the email discussion is over.

HiveLive

HiveLive is another type of white-label social networking platform for enterprise. I haven’t ran across anyone from this company to get a more personal look into their product, but HiveLive has been mentioned within my socialsphere for social media enterprise solutions. I wish they had some type of demo on their website.

Company overview from website:

HiveLive’s on-demand software enables companies to rapidly deploy custom-fit enterprise communities built around people, their relationships, and their shared knowledge. The foundation of our patent pending technology is a new Web 2.0 building block (called a Hive) that can be easily configured to function as a wide range of community applications (blogs, wikis, forums, FAQs, and more). With our platform, companies can connect to three community solutions:

Lithium

Lithium was a spin-off of Gamers.com in which they had deployed their first ‘enterprise forum’ for Dell.com. Currently their community/forum clients have expanded to over 50 market leaders such as Cingular, Comcast, Sprint,Nintendo, and more.

What I like is how they tease with the pricing of their product with general information on how things will be priced. A great model to spur interest and lead to that client call.

They have an extensive list of client website examples which as a great added feature to their website and quite frankly is really impressive.

Company overview from website:

The technology and social software principles we use date way back to product development started in 1997. At Gamers.com, our founders developed custom message boards for the very active participants in the online gaming industry. Online gamers demand novel personalization features and innovation, they probe for security vulnerabilities, and they use vast amounts of bandwidth. Imagine that. So, developing a platform to address this criteria warranted a fast, scalable, reliable, secure, and easily customizable solution. All the required elements for success in other enterprise communities as well, we thought. And this foundation became the perfect springboard for businesses that wanted to let their customers communicate in their own online forums.

Corespeed

The last entry in the social media enterprise offering before we dive into the last 3 which are open source is Corespeed. This company though their own website is less than appealing seems to focus more on an application that is your traditional social networking/portal solution.

Their own community utilized their main product which is always a great way to demo your product and take it for a test run. They package some products as “hubs” around Expert, Community, Customer, and Team hubs.

Company overview from website:

CoreSpeed provides a suite of products that enterprises leverage to create and enhance business systems with rich user interfaces, flexible content management, and an extensible service-oriented component architecture to facilitate better business interactions.

CoreSpeed’s primary product platform, CoreInteractive, is used by organizations, non-profit and for-profit, that recognize the need to expose and leverage communities that already exist off-line as online solutions as well as to execute innovative business models built around community and social networks/media.

Open Source Products

Of the above seven options I would like to highlight the last three social media solutions which can be used for enterprise. Of course with any open source solution the key is the amount of support a company is willing to invest and or customizations they wish to include which will add costs on to the initial potentially zero investment.

BoonEx

BoonEx has a suite of open source products that are solid. Their social networking platform called Dolphin is quite frankly the most robust open source solution in this space that I have seen with features that rival the most robust paid enterprise solutions.

I have installed Dolphin numerous times and the install is quick and easy and the included features and modules are amazing.

Design and templates are few and far between. The better looking templates are of course premium which still is at a fairly low cost compared to most paid solutions. A highly recommended open source solution.

Company overview from website:

BoonEx has a unique approach to running business – we treat every employee as a community member and all our internal operations are based on community moderation principles. All BoonEx-ers are equal decision-makers motivated to reach a common goal – to build a reputation as the leading community software provider.

BoonEx brings people and computer technologies closer together. One of the primary ways we accomplish this is by conducting superior web software development to create premium community applications that are then tested live on our own sites/projects.

PHPizabi

This PHP solution is another vetern in the open source solution for social networks. The support community is an active self supporting group. I have had an opportunity to install this solution as well and it was fairly straight forward with a nice front end and flexible admin area to customize the user experience.

At times I wish there were more developed custom modules that can be added along with a larger selection and community developing custom themes to select from.

In either case a solid foundation for a company to utilize to test the waters of a social media campaign. Though I wouldn’t use it for a long term campaign. If anyone differs please comment why.

Company overview from website:

PHPizabi is one of the most powerful social networking platforms on the planet. With literally thousands of websites powered by PHPizabi including everything from simple friends sites to the most complex networking super sites out there. Easy to install, use, and raising the bar on what it is to provide a reliable, fast, social networking package to raise your business to the next level.

elgg

The last entry for this post if a company that has a product named elgg. I did not place this one last because in some shape or form it was less inferior to other solutions, I placed it last to hopefully be seen as a solution to watch.

elgg is newcomer at this stage within the open source enterprise space. I recently installed it on one of my servers and tested its features. I must admit the user interface is by far the best among even the top enterprise solutions mentioned here.

I currently showcase this solution as the “skinny Facebook”. This is probably how Facebook would look if started today and they had a designer as one of the co-founders. Currently the biggest lacking feature is no Photo or Video option. For social media “media” per se is a key ingredient to a successfull community.

I am going to continue to watch and monitor elgg. If the developers and community continue to grow this product it will make a huge impact.

Company overview from website:

Elgg is an open, flexible social networking engine, designed to run at the heart of any socially-aware application. Building on Elgg is easy, and because the engine handles common web application and social functionality for you, you can concentrate on developing your idea.