This July, Facebook began beta-testing its new Q&A feature, joining the likes of Yahoo!, Answers, Ask.com, Quora and Aardvark (recently acquired by Google) allowing users to seek answers to their questions from their social network or the online community at large. Indeed, as more and more Q&A services enter the market, businesses should pay attention and get into the conversation.
Here’s why:
For one, online search is evolving. To optimize their rankings in search results, businesses must keep up with the latest keywords to use, as well as where to use them. Search engines like Google and Bing now include “social search” – a type of Web search that aims to deliver more relevant results by drawing content from a user’s social network – including Q&A forums, blogs, subscribed RSS feeds, status updates, tweets, etc. This gives businesses plenty of opportunity to build and manage their brand presence online, especially considering the huge amount of data shared on social networking sites (Note that as of June 2010, Americans now spend most of their online time on social networks compared to other online activities like gaming, e-mailing and watching videos, according to research firm The Nielsen Company).
Secondly, while users are indeed amping up social networking activity, they are also searching for advice from credentialed sources, not just their peers. According to The 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer (a trust and credibility survey by public relations firm Edelman), when it comes to getting information about a company, trust in “conversations with friends and peers,” along with trust in traditional media, declined over the past year in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). On the other hand, trust in a CEO as company spokesperson is recovering, while academics, industry experts and financial analysts continue to be seen as the most credible sources of company news.
This means that so long as companies don’t appear self-serving and don’t resort to market-speak, they might earn “brownie points” by offering their knowledge and expertise in Q&A forums and by cultivating a wide network of expert spokespeople who can address consumer questions regarding topics that relate to the company, its products and the broader industry in general.
Third, Q&A discussions can reveal consumer preferences and other valuable data that companies can use to generate leads and provide targeted advertising. Facebook’s “self-service ad system,” for example, already allows companies to deliver ads to a targeted group of users, based on their profiles and the stuff that they “like.” Facebook’s new Q&A feature, which will allow users to add polls – e.g., Which is better for your 8-year old cousin: Nintendo Wii or Xbox? – can only enhance the site’s algorithm and improve product recommendations, benefiting advertisers and consumers alike.
Of course, as in any good conversation, listening is key. Businesses that want to make the most of social search and Q&A sites should take the time to understand not just what’s being asked, but also why, so as to provide the best service to consumers, and to make the most sense when they do speak up.
Businesses are increasingly using social media to connect with consumers and enhance brand awareness. However, according to a 2009 global study sponsored by technology giant Cisco, few businesses have formal processes and policies in place to govern social media use, and this lack could lead to improper disclosure and misrepresentation.
The Cisco study, the first of a two-part series, is based on in-depth interviews with 105 participants from 97 organizations in 20 countries. It was carried out by IESE Business School in Spain (an operating partner of the Institute for Media and Entertainment), the E. Philip Saunders College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the U.S., and the Henley Business School in the United Kingdom.
According to the study, social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter are becoming a key part of business initiatives in areas like marketing and communications, human relations and customer service. However, only one in seven of the surveyed companies had a formal process to implement social media tools, and only one in 10 involved their IT departments in their social media strategies. What’s more, respondents admitted that they find it difficult to create and adopt policies that strike the right balance between the personal nature of social networking, and proper corporate oversight.
As companies integrate social media in their operations, the study suggests that the following issues be addressed: When, how and what initiatives are to be launched (and not launched); how the enabling technologies should be managed; and how employee use of these technologies should be managed.
For study highlights and additional information, you can read the full Cisco news release here.
Fresh from buffing up its site and eager to redefine its identity, MySpace has a new mission: collaborate and make “friends” with other players — especially the “cool kids” in social media. An interesting strategy, but will it be enough to bring MySpace back into the “in crowd?”
As we noted in a previous post on MySpace, while the company has been losing supporters to Facebook, it still has a lead on videos and music. Unsurprisingly, MySpace recently refocused its efforts on these strengths, in a bid to differentiate itself from Facebook and to woo back users and advertisers.
Recent site improvements include: 1) launching MySpace Music Videos, which aggregated video content from major music labels and independent record companies; 2) purchasing and integrating iLike, a music-sharing app; and 3) offering artists and labels an interactive tool to analyze audience data, through the MySpace Artist Dashboard.
“Facebook is about core communications with your friendship network, whereas MySpace is about congregating around popular content with people who share your interests,” said MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, in a Telegraph interview.
As proof of this new direction, MySpace is now in talks with Facebook to allow users to share MySpace music and videos on Facebook, via Facebook Connect. Indeed, MySpace is all about collaboration nowadays. “Partnerships are going to be a big part of our strategy moving forward as a lot of value can be derived from them,” Van Natta told the Telegraph.
Aside from the potential Facebook team-up, MySpace is now working with Apple to allow users to purchase songs via iTunes. It’s also one of the companies powering “music results” and enabling “music purchases” on Google’s new music discovery service, “Google Music.” AllThingsDigital’s Kara Swisher reports that MySpace is even exploring a partnership with Microsoft to offer MySpace Music on MSN.
So will this new entertainment-focused and “collaborative” MySpace finally get out of Facebook’s shadow and succeed in carving out its own niche online again? It’s possible. By emphasizing licensed content from professional and independent artists, and by catering to music fans, MySpace is “filling a gap in popular culture left by MTV's move years ago away from music programming and the diminishment of music publications,” notes Forbes. This, in turn, could lead to more ad dollars.
New friends or not, however, MySpace still has to face other tough competitors — such as YouTube, the top-ranking video portal owned by Google. A recent report by marketing research firm comScore notes, for example, that Google sites rank first in all online viewership — drawing in 26 million viewers, who watched 10.4 billion videos, as of September. Of that number, YouTube accounted for 99 percent.
And of course, when it comes to business and profit, how long can “online friendships” really last? The turbulent world of digital media is filled with tales of “partners-turned-competitors” (an example might be Apple and Google on online mapping). MySpace’s new “ties” could end up complicated. If its video-streaming service ends up threatening YouTube, for example, how would Google react? It would be interesting to see how MySpace would fight for audience and advertising support, and how it would balance collaboration with competition, as it continues its revamp.
Is Facebook a threat to Google? First Facebook buys FriendFeed, a service that instantaneously aggregates information from social media sites. Then Facebook rolls out an improved search system, enabling users to browse through posts by friends, by Facebook users who have elected to go public, and by Web results — all in real time.
Asking whether or not Facebook is a threat to Google is key because as social networking is gaining popularity — unique visitors to Twitter, for example, grew 950 percent in the past year, according to July data from Web analytics firm Compete — more and more people are sharing information in real time, whether through status updates, tweets, photos or links. The need to track and sort through everything that has been posted is changing “search” as we know it. How?
First: The increased need for speed. While Twitter hasn’t replaced traditional journalism, for example, it has become a hub for breaking stories, with users tweeting about events like the February Turkish Airlines crash as it happened. Services like FriendFeed collect updates like this from sites like Twitter, notifies you about them, and allows you to search through all the posted data instantly. Meanwhile, traditional search, such as the kind Google does, indexes information from the Web only periodically. Google might therefore need to speed up its indexing to strengthen its market lead.
In an interview earlier this year with TechCrunch, Google Co-Founder Larry Page admitted: "I have always thought we needed to index the Web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it."
But why did Facebook, which already had a service akin to Friendfeed — its News Feed — still buy the company? Some, like CNET News and BusinessWeek, say that it’s a talent acquisition, as FriendFeed engineers are mostly ex-Googlers who helped build Web services like Google Talk, Google Maps, and Gmail. In any case, Facebook stands to learn and benefit from FriendFeed’s features. In the official press release, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor noted that they will “bring many of the innovations…developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”
Second: The increased need for relevancy. When the World Health Organization raised the pandemic alert on swine flu in April, social media blog Mashable reported more than 10,000 tweets per hour about the virus. Indeed, the constant stream of updates on sites like Facebook or Twitter makes it difficult to monitor relevant posts or sift through data. It’s crucial, therefore, to have an advanced search function that enables users to filter noise from news — a technology such as the one offered by FriendFeed, where you can even search for keywords.
Google already has an advanced search function, but it doesn’t have real-time results just yet. That is why analysts from media and technology publications like TechCrunch and BoomTown think a Google/Twitter team-up would be the right move, especially as Facebook’s reach expands. While Google has kept mum on this possibility, it did recently unveil “Google Caffeine,” an upgraded version that speeds up its search results and promises improved accuracy, size and comprehensiveness.
For now, it’s too early to see whether Facebook will be able to do in search what it had done in social networking. Nevertheless, Google needs to speed up searches to real time if it wants to stay ahead in the rapidly-evolving search race.
Once the king of social networking, MySpace continues to bleed subscribers to archrival Facebook, which grew 221 percent over last year, while MySpace inched up less than half of a percent, according to July data from Web analytics firm Compete. Rupert Murdoch, CEO of MySpace parent company NewsCorp, blamed himself for the mess in an interview with TheStreet.com, and declared that MySpace is getting things right and will be a strong force in many ways. But could it? Let’s take a closer look.
One company strategy is to launch in the near future MySpace Mail, enabling users to send and receive multi-media messages using a dedicated account — something Facebook doesn’t offer and doesn’t seem to be considering. MySpace says this potentially makes it the second biggest e-mail provider in the U.S. But a recent report by online widget-maker AddToAny notes that more users favor sharing content through Facebook over e-mailing anyway. So is MySpace Mail a threat to Facebook? Probably not.
Another strategy is to strengthen its video game platform. "MySpace is and will be more in the future a gaming platform," said Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller at the recent Fortune Brainstorm: TECH conference. Seems like a wise move, as users pay to access premium content on their favorite games, customize their avatars, or send virtual gifts. In fact, roughly 12 percent of Americans bought a virtual item at some point in the last 12 months, according to research firm Frank N. Magid Associates.
Facebook, however, currently has more applications than MySpace, and has already rolled out its own micropayment system allowing users to buy virtual credits. What’s more, according to media and marketing research firm Nielsen, total minutes spent on Facebook increased 699 percent year-over-year in April, while time spent on MySpace fell 31 percent. Combined with Facebook’s sheer number of users, guess which company would be more attractive to game developers?
There are, however, two areas where MySpace still takes a lead. The first is videos: Nielsen reports that MySpace ranked first among social media sites with 120.1 million total video streams as of June, compared to Facebook’s 54 million. However, Nielsen also noted that Facebook was the fastest-growing site for both total video streams and unique viewers of video, growing 434 and 397 percent year-over-year respectively.
The second is music: Since its launch last September, MySpace Music grew its unique visitors 190 percent, from 4.2 million to 12.1 million as of June, according to Nielsen. While Facebook has a popular music application (iLike, a third party app, which has been renamed to “Music” on the site), it doesn’t have its own dedicated music service — unless it buys iLike, which some, including CNET News, consider a possibility.
The verdict? While MySpace loses out on social networking traffic, it still has an upper hand on assets like videos and music. But Facebook is catching up quickly even on these, and MySpace has to focus on making its good points more attractive to advertisers, developers and users while it still can, if it wants to hold on to its lead.
Can Twitter make it as a business tool?
The popular microblogging service hopes so, and is repositioning itself as a “communication” network, rather than a “social” network, with an eye toward offering paid analytics and other business tools.
How exactly can companies benefit? Think branding, public relations and market research. They can answer questions and interact with customers, highlight promotions, and basically “tweet” what’s happening organization-wide or personally, raising awareness and appeal. They can also find out what people are saying about them or a product in real time, either by asking “followers” directly, or by using features like Twitter search. And as more and more apps get built around Twitter — TwitPay, powered by PayPal, lets you buy and send payments, for one — the benefits increase.
A best-case example is Dell Outlet, whose coupons get retweeted by users and picked up by coupon sites, resulting in $3 million in additional sales. “The uplift has been more than we dreamed,” says Stefanie Nelson, Manager of Demand Generation, adding that brand awareness has grown. “When we respond to people on Twitter, they get really excited, and we gain advocates.”
But of course, it’s not all roses. It takes considerable time and effort to build “followers” and establish one’s footing on the site, especially because there’s so much customer churn. In fact, a recent Nielsen report found that roughly 60 percent of tweeters end up abandoning the service after a month, primarily because they just don’t “get into it.”
Another issue is managing expectations. Because of Twitter’s instantaneous nature, when users raise customer service concerns, they generally expect a quick reply — often, within hours. And because it’s in a public arena, executives can’t slip up when responding, no matter how confrontational the tweet, and regardless of the 140-characters-or-less limit, because news will travel fast.
Lastly, like most online applications (especially the free ones), security is a risk. A Twitter employee’s account recently got hacked and more than 300 confidential documents leaked out. Companies are also vulnerable to people claiming and falsely using their names inappropriately. Employees could also tweet about proprietary info, tipping off competitors. And the list goes on.
So can Twitter really be an effective business tool? The answer depends on two things: How much businesses use it, and how long Twitter can hold onto its users and, therefore, its appeal.
Fearful that it could affect the “real” economy or lead to money laundering, the Chinese government recently banned the use of virtual currency to buy real-world goods, and imposed a tax on all profits made from the sale of virtual items. Whether or not that’s an overreaction, one thing is clear: There’s real money to be made in fast-growing virtual economies, for developers, advertisers, content distributors and consumers alike.
Of course, the biggest chunk is still coming from MMOs (massively multi-player online games), with players buying and selling virtual currency, properties and other assets to get ahead in their virtual worlds. In fact, “gold farming,” or hiring people to play so they could earn in-game advantages that can then be sold to other players, generates nearly one billion dollars a year worldwide, according to The University of Manchester’s Institute for Development Policy and Management.
But that's not the only place where virtual currency is a big factor. Facebook, for example, lets users buy credits to send virtual gifts to friends, starting at $1 for 10 credits. Some applications also let consumers earn currency by taking surveys or completing ad offers online.
This growing market is good news for developers looking to monetize their Web apps and games. This is also good for advertisers looking for alternatives, especially as more and more users block ads on their browsers or simply ignore banner ads completely.
“We believe that what contextual ads did the for the Web, virtual currency is doing to the social Web,” Adknowledge CEO Scott Lynn told Mediapost, after his company plunked down an undisclosed amount (close to $50 million, according to TechCrunch) for KITN Media, parent of Super Rewards, a virtual currency platform. It’s an interesting buy: Together, Adknowledge and Super Rewards will be dealing with 80 percent of all top social networking apps, and is expected to generate $250 million in revenue this year.
So what’s next? How about virtual currency that can be used — ideally — on any site? If reports are true, Facebook plans on launching such a system, using Facebook Connect. Basically, users will get to buy credits and spend them not only on Facebook, but on all the Web sites that use Facebook Connect, eliminating the need for multiple credit card transactions and earning Facebook a hefty commission in transaction fees, a la PayPal.
In its most expensive purchase to date, Amazon snaps up rising rival Zappos for more than $900 million. This came as a surprise to those expecting the shoe e-tailer to hold out for an IPO, but what’s even more surprising was how Amazon announced the merger: CEO Jeff Bezos posted a video on YouTube, a move more characteristic of Zappos and its CEO Tony Hsieh, who himself broke the news on his company blog and Twitter account.
Indeed, Amazon may have the resources, technology and operational experience of an e-commerce giant, but it has long been criticized for not “getting” social media. A recent example is AmazonFail, where Tweeters lashed out at the company after it removed sales ranking of books with "adult content,” including LGBT-themed books. Amazon took a day to respond, and when it did, sent the statement to the Associated Press first, instead of fighting the fire where it started — at Twitter.
Zappos, on the other hand, has mastered Web 2.0 branding. In a recent survey by Abrams Research, the company was voted as having done the best job of using social media. Hsieh himself now has more than one million followers on Twitter, and encourages his employees to tweet, use Facebook and Multiply, or upload videos online to let customers get to know them personally.
“I think people worry too much about bringing their personal selves into business, when I think the way to succeed in today’s world is to make your business more personal,” says Hsieh in an interview for Mashable.com. That “personal touch” also means Zappos makes sure every customer leaves with a positive experience — whether through super-fast shipping, long phone conversations or 365-day refunds.
Will the Zappos culture be zapped, or will it be tolerated, if not emulated, by Amazon? That remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: social media know-how is becoming an indispensable tool in business success. As Hsieh concludes at Mashable.com, “Today anyone, whether it is an employee or a customer, if they have a good or bad experience with your company they can blog about it or Twitter about it and it can be seen by millions of people. It’s what they say now that is your brand.”
