So this is yet another twitter application done by another company/website. One thing is interesting however is the fact that now the question will arise. Will teens join in the twitter phenomenon?

During the summer of 2009 there were many artices, blog posts and studies on how tween are not adopting the use of Twitter therefore from an advertising and marketing standpoint Twitter was unique with other social networking sites that have exploded over the past few years.

If we take a look at the statistics from the research firm Pew Internet we can see:

• 19% of online adults age 18-24 have used twitter or something like it
• 20% of online adults age 25-34 have used twitter or something like it
• 10% of online adults age 35-44 “    “     “    “
• 5% of online adults age 45-54  “    “    “   “
• 4% of online adults age 55-64  “    “    “   “
• 2% of online adults 65+

source: sociamediatoday.com blog post

So the majority of the users are 25-44.

My thought has always been that due to the fact that many teens and youth are just beginning to purchase “smart phones” and typically they share the monthly bill with their parents (or are just included with their parents bill) not all teens have mostly low minutes and an unlimited texting plan with limited ‘data access’.

Now with MySpace which has the largest youth demographic of all social networks exposes the Twitter status updates to teens, it will only be a matter of a few short months before the younger demographic for twitter will explode.

Your thoughts?

As we can see from the graph below toward the end of January 2009 Facebook will become the most popular social networking website on the internet.

I think this is primarily due to the fact that Facebook is grabbing all of the ‘MySpace graduates’.

Social Networking is all about the demographic and what that demographic does with the tools it has from a social networking standpoint.

I have seen this before from personal experience when I founded a small niche social ‘community’ back in 2003 it grow tremendously (for the niche) for a couple of years.  When MySpace came around it grabbed 80% of the audience from my small community website (currently over 30,000 members). Now Facebook has been growing because users of MySpace are ‘graduating’ from MySpace and moving on to the social networking community that the rest of their peers are utilizing.

Ask anyone who is in college if they use MySpace. More than likely their response will be that MySpace is for ‘kids’ or high schoolers.

Next Social Network Graduate?

My question is what or who will be the next social networking website that will draw in the graduates of ‘Facebook’?

As we can see from the visual to the left, social networking utilization is primarily for communication and conversation followed by multimedia activites such as music, video, and photos.

The lesser percentages is that of actual ‘contributors’ or ‘creators’ of content.

I wonder if social networking websites such as LinkedIn.com or even Tagged.com will become that next step for graduates of Facebook.com?

Or perhaps users will become so overwhelmed by marketers and advertising on Facebook that they decide to leverage the micro-blogging genre such as Twitter.com or Plurk.com?

My thought for a successful social networking website is one that will be a merger between P2P and a Microblog. Based on statistics known in visual. There is a need for such a service that will provide multimedia content without a user having to contribute or create the content themselves and at the same time be able to add their own photos and be given the opportunity to have conversations with those that they gauge as their most valuable ‘friends’.

Could a service like this pull the next graduate class from Facebook?

As Social Media is about communication and discussion in its raw definition, how can this information be tracked on a daily basis as the ‘buzz’ of a brand or event is measured not by days but by hours in some cases.

That is why software  (and typically SaaS) company to measure social media are establishing themselves. These following companies are ones that have been highly recommended by my peers and I would recommend as well. Of course there are many others that are beginning to make waves these 3 are ones to review.

1. Radian6

Below are excerpts from the product page of the Radian6 product.

Radian6 software is quick and easy.  The user simply sets up topics using keywords.  Keywords could include names of brands, companies, products, competitors, issues, campaigns, spokespeople, executives or anything else that requires monitoring.

Once setup is complete, the solution automatically collects and tracks content for the topic.  It monitors all forms of social media including blogs, top video sharing and social networking sites, forums, opinion and review sites, image sharing sites, microblogging sites, online mainstream media and other sites as they become available.

Analyze your topic with a number of user-friendly widgets – mini-applications accessible through a dashboard that provide quick access to specific information.  As content is discovered, the solution automatically and continually tracks comments, viewership, user engagement and other metrics, 24/7, so that you can clearly see the reach and affect each post has on the community.  Know immediately which content is making an impact and what needs to be managed.  Uncover the influencers online by topic, based on user-determined formula weightings.  Listen and learn more about these influencers and decide on a path of engagement tracking the steps along the way.

Easily export data and analysis for use in your reports, presentations and spreadsheets.  Radian6’s social media monitoring solution can export reports using any variety of formats.

The company allows for demo signups to review and test drive their software.

2. Cymfony Orchestra (TNS Media Intelligence)

Below are excerpts from the product page of the Cymfony Orchestra product.

TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony’s Orchestra breaks new ground by enabling organizations to view traditional and consumer-generated media in one application, providing more comprehensive and complete real-time consumer and market insights. The convergence of multiple media sources enables a broader range of groups across the organization to benefit from the media analysis and discovery functions, including real-time “side-by-side” analysis of mainstream and consumer-generated media.

TNS MI/Cymfony’s Orchestra platform consists of two applications:

1. Our proprietary Natural Language Processing engine automatically aggregates, classifies, quantifies, and benchmarks both traditional and consumer-generated media.

2. The second application is a Web-based interface that provides a dashboard to analyze these multiple media sources. The Orchestra online dashboard provides access to real-time data at any time from any web browser. Orchestra requires no IT development and it easily integrates with your current workflow

TNS also has a call to action on their website to schedule a demo of their product or to contact one of their sales representatives to get more information on the product.

3. Sm2 (Techrigy)

Below are excerpts from the product page of the Sm2 product. What I like personally about Sm2 is the instant account creation that allows you to have a limited ability to test drive their application for your social media initiative.

SM2 is a social media monitoring and analysis solution designed for PR and marketing professionals. With SM2 you can track conversations, reviews and positive/negative sentiment for your brands, clients, competitors and partners across the eco-system called social media: blogs, wikis, microblogs like Twitter, social networks, embedded video and more – in real time.

SM2 doesn’t just return keyword search results. You get complete analysis tools including charting with comparisons, demographics, geo-location, sentiment and drill-down reports. It’s easy to use and, because it’s hosted, cost-effective to implement. With our Freemium Account you can run tests on your brands to manage risk, track trends, understand market reach and manage reputation. With our paid plans you can track one client or hundreds- SM2 scales with your needs.

Information is power and there’s a lot of information in Social Media. Adding SM2 capabilities to your practice gives you the ability to offer enhanced services and expertise to your clients including brand sentiment and conversation tracking, risk management and trend development in social media.

As I mentioned, the great thing about the Sm2 product is the fact that you can get your feet wet with their product instantly after creating an account with Techrigy.

blog post photo credit: www.masternewmedia.org

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.

That is when I embraced RIM’s Blackberry 8820 which I use to this day.

Since I have gotten my 8820 back in October 2007, I have been watching  the new products from RIM. The Blackberry Bold recently launched in the beginning of November. I wanted to jump and get that one but I decided to wait to have the touchscreen Blackberry Storm to launch tomorrow November 21, 2008.

I ran across a great Blackberry Storm review from Dan Frommer of Silicon Valley Insider.

Also, here is a great Blackberry Storm video review from jkOntherun.com

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8aeT-MquFw[/youtube]

I am going to wait a few weeks to see what the feedback is on this phone but I tend to agree with the reviewer that the touchscreen keyboard may make or break this devise as it is a great step for RIM and the Blackberry products. Your thoughts?

This means that Facebook will charge $375 per year for an application that is verified. If your application is verified you get the following:

Badging

• A verified badge graphic displayed on your application’s About Page indicating that it has been verified by Facebook.
• A special icon displayed next to your application in listings within the Application Directory.

Distribution

• Increased allocations for requests, notifications, and emails.
• Increased visibility for News Feed stories.

Advertising

• $100 of Facebook advertising credit.

Events

• Discounted registration fees to events like f8, Facebook’s Developer Conference.

In my opinion this an excellent example of platform type sites that have open APIs in order for other developers to build upon and if the applications are successful (Facebook applications are a great example) the platform is able to associate a fee for the applications to be ‘verified’.

This seals an application and its authority on the website and seperates it from many of the applications that are a dime a dozen.

For more detailed information on the process and policies to become verified please visit the Facebook Developer Verification area.

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.

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.

Social Media according to Wikipedia.org is: primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences. Source: Wikipedia

Social Media can further be dissected into four primary channels which encompass all of the internet-based tools with relative examples.

1. Communication

The initial grandfather of Social Media is Communication. The internet at its core was developed to communicate among other users. Beginning with usenet, emails, forums, etc. The progression led to our current tools used for communication among Social Media.

• Blogs – Blogger (service), Livejournal, TypePad, WordPress, Vox,
• Microblogs – Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr
• Social Networking – Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, hi5, Bebo
• Social Netowrking Aggregators – Friendfeed, Plaxo, Profilactic, Youmeo
• Events – upcoming.org, eventful

2. Collaboration

As the internet evolved and the adoption of broadband as common use among the majority of internet users, collaboration was fueled by a multitude of companies and services that were introduced. Collaboration is at the heart of Social Media. Such services can be broken up into:

• Wikis – Wikipedia, Wetpaint
• Online Office Suites – Google Docs, Zoho Office Suite, Acrobat.com
• Social Bookmarking – delicious.com, StumbleUpon, reddit
• Social News Sites – Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Newsvine
• Opinion Sites – eOpinions, Yelp, Amazon reviews

3. Multimedia

With the continued emergence of broadband, internet users adopted the sharing of multimedia. File sharing became the norm before copyright laws brought those services down in order to be regulated. This gave birth to multimedia social media sites that were used as tools to facilitate multimedia on demand. These can be broken up into:

• Photo sharing – Flickr, Photobucket, SmugMug, Zoomr
• Video sharing – YouTube, Veo, Revver, Vimeo
• Livecasting – Ustream, Justin.tv
• Audio and Music Sharing – imeem, Last.fm, Pandora

4. Entertainment

The final channel is that of entertainment. Entertainment online through games has been a fixture on the internet as far as the early years of the internet with the early 80’s film “War Games” with Matthew Broderick. Since then gaming and entertainment has evolved into a complete social medium allowing people to interact, communicate, and collaborate in real time with players on a global scale. The current breakup of the entertainment channel for social media can be defined as:

• Virtual Worlds – Second Life, Webkinz, Toppstown
• Online Gaming – World of Warcraft
• Game Sharing – Kongregrate, Miniclip.com

Now that the four main channels are outlined and broken up into understandable mediums it is important to know that these are only tools and technologies that if not understood in how they fit within an overall strategy for a Social Media initiative it will be a case of the unknown for those that try to dive into Social Media. The consensus is to try Social Media for the sake of not remaining behind with a trend. This should not be the case.

There are clear strategies for External (Client Strategy), Internal (Strategy Execution) which include Certain Deliverables along with the most important factor, Measurement of results both from a Return on Investment to what needs to be redefined as Return on Engagement. I will followup with another post on these next topics.