Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category

Long gone are the days of boring mass-market charities and impersonal giving catered towards older white males. Web 2.0 has arrived and it has dramatically changed the face of online charity. The Internet makes it possible for virtually any social player to have a voice and a method of raising money. Web 2.0 has impacted charitable giving in powerful ways, from politics to AIDS research.

Top charitable causes in the web 2.0 fray incorporate social media and social networking to help spread viral ideas, facilitate community around causes, and involve users in their charity and message. A few of my favorites include:

• Kiva
• Good2Gether
• Yahoo! for Good
• DoTheRightThing.com
• DonorsChoose.org
• RonPaul2008.com
• Change.org

How non-profits are using social networking to raise money and awareness
“Online social networks used to be just gathering places for friends and long-lost acquaintances. Then the marketers arrived, followed by politicians and job recruiters, all looking to tap into a growing mass of young people who are spending much of their time on the Web. Now, non-profit organizations are testing ways to raise money through these networks, betting that the Internet’s viral nature will open fresh avenues for fundraising and marketing.”

A key point often forgot (or simply ignored) by marketers and individuals looking to make a splash in the social media realm is the idea that you need to add value to receive value in the world of web 2.0.   Countless stories can be cited of companies and marketers entering the social media and social networking fray trying to tap into the social sphere, but ignoring the very core reason why the social realm exists.  This reason is so that users can help users.  Collaboration is the cornerstone of community and an analogy for successful open source and collaborative initiatives can be summed down to “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

It’s this principle, though, that’s often overlooked by many.  It goes back to my recent blog post entitled 99% in which I quoted Seth Godin from his new book, Meatball Sundae, in which he wrote: “1 percent of the people are givers. In Wikipedia, for example, about 1 percent of the users create and edit articles.”  Using this logic, there is a huge chunk of social media users who are content to be social media browsers and not contributers.  This is all fine and dandy, but my point in this post is that if you’re striving to market and actually market effectively using the social media realm as your stomping grounds, you simply have to fall in the category of a contributer, otherwise your efforts won’t be nearly as effective, if it all.

What does this mean?  It means that before you start a Facebook advertising campaign, Facebook company profile, and spam a bunch of Facebook users with your marketing message, take a step back (and a deep breath while you’re at it).  Just like with organic search engine optimization, success in social media marketing isn’t usually something that happens overnight.  The efforts that lead up to a particularly viral blog post, a following on Digg, success on YouTube, or getting your Squidoo lens to bring traffic to your website are typically overlooked, but for the sake of my argument, this is a huge mistake.  Using Facebook as an example, before you do what I’ve described above, it’s a better approach to first actually use Facebook for a while on a personal level.  Add friends, make connections, and focus on adding value to the community.  Post relevant and thoughtful notes, actually contribute to groups, and stay in touch regularly with friends.  Once you’ve built a presence and a following as a contributer, you can then begin to phase in your marketing goals.  This is true with nearly any social media marketing campaign.  Before you’re blog is going to work for your business, you need to first focus on writing good content, and a lot of it.  You need to first focus on reading OTHER blogs and posting thoughtful comments and responding to comments you receive.  You get my point: contribution is the effective stepping stone to marketing results.

I’ll pause now on the social media marketing discussion (don’t worry, I’ll be coming back to it regularly in the future). In the meantime, I’d like to highlight one website in particular that could be a valuable tool in your social media toolbox, if you follow my advice above: Squidoo.

Squidoo is a website that was pioneered by marketing guru Seth Godin as a social platform for easily creating pages on any topic imaginable and enjoying the benefits of a strong community and the inheritance of great PageRank.  Squidoo does a good job describing itself: “Squidoo is an incredibly easy platform that allows you to build a lens, all by yourself, in less than five minutes. Don’t build a lens instead of your website. Build a lens to help your website.”

Squidoo is great because it’s super quick to get a “lens” started and constructed with social media and search engines in mind.  If you’re a pet shop, you can easily create a comprehensive lens on, say, raising a lesser-known species of turtle or perhaps starting an aquarium.  With a multitude of widgets to choose from, you can add content, plug-in RSS feeds, showcase photos via Flickr, highlight products via Amazon, or present videos via YouTube.  What’s more, you can easily categorize and tag your lens before subsequently submitting to social bookmarking sites and joining Squidoo groups.

All of this means you can drive traffic to your website, earn money on ads (or donate the money to charity), build credibility, build online brand/name presence, and provide individuals, including your prospects, with valuable information at a time when they’re looking for it, a time when your help can make an impression.

Before you think it’s too good to be true, remind yourself that your initial goal is narrow: to focus on contributing and adding value.  Squidoo is merely a platform for adding worthy content and fresh (or different, or witty, or more useful) information to the web.  The web may be cluttered and crowded, but one thing is true: value has a way of floating to the top.

So head on over to Squidoo and let this lens help you get started.  Need an example of an informative lens? We recently build this lens on finding and choosing a web design company.  Still need more assistance?  Check out their FAQ and forum!

99% of your social network’s current and/or future users are what I call “reactive users.” This group is content to read and accept, but isn’t the group that is going to customize their profile to an extreme, contribute blog posts, upload videos, spread the word virally, etc… I’m not saying that this group won’t do these activities, just that they will approach these activities with a limited amount of energy and commitment as well as a different paradigm.

The 1% left are the “proactive users.” Seth Godin in his new book Meatball Sundae (highly recommended) contributes the following:

“Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba’s book Citizen Marketer proves that in just about every community, 1 percent of the people are givers. In Wikipedia, for example, about 1 percent of the users create and edit articles. Same goes for Microsoft’s Channel 9 Web site. They get four and a half million visitors a month, and almost exactly 1 percent of them contribute comments. The same math works for Digg, Reddit, and YouTube. One percent of blog readers are blog writers. One percent of talk-radio listeners are callers. The thing is, you don’t know who they are. You don’t know which 1 percent of your customers and prospects are the ones who need to, love to, and want to post about their experience. It’s like Russian Roulette. You have to assume that every chamber is loaded, that every interaction is an interaction with a critic.”

What does this mean to a fledgling social networking website or to the likes of even Facebook or Bebo? IMO, there are several take-aways:

• You can try to figure out a way to increase the 1% to 2% or maybe 5%, maybe even 10%. Possible? Maybe. How? Make it easier to contribute, quicker to spread the word, more rewarding to post content, etc… It’s like our national voting problem: many people don’t vote simply because they feel, at least internally, that their vote doesn’t count. The same rings true on the web; if users don’t feel like their vote (or post, or video, or profile, etc…) doesn’t count, they won’t bother to show up and they certainly won’t wear the “I Just Voted” sticker (or, in terms of the web, they won’t spread the message virally if they themselves don’t buy into it).
• You must treat every interaction with a user as if they are or can be part of that proactive 1%.
• Appealing to the 1% is more important than anything in terms of marketing, yet appealing to the 99% is crucial for obvious reasons. Without the 1%, you won’t have the 99% and reverse. And just as passionately as the 1% can involve themselves into your social networking website can the 99% devolve themselves if rubbed the wrong way.
• If you thought you needed 1,000 users or 50,000 users for your community to be considered a success, think again. A threshold in terms of users doesn’t mean anything if only 10 out of the 1,000 are the proactive users or if you’ve discovered a way to increase this percentage. A passionate group of 100 users can be much more beneficial than a laid-back group of 10,000.

-RB

In what’s becoming a crowded space (though don’t get me wrong, there is still much seating and standing room), social networking websites in mass have “officially” arrived. Sure, the industry powerhouses have been around for some time now, but over the last couple of years it’s feeling like “Star Wars — Attack of the Clones” with all of the social networking websites cropping up around this niche and that specialty and those demographics. It’s similar to the domain name explosion or the rise of e-commerce; more often than not if you can think it, chances are there’s a social network around it.

So what’s my point, you ask? The point is, if you’re going to build a successful social networking website and you want a vibrant community (as no matter what your goals are with the website, community will be critical), you must avoid the idea of simple cloning what’s already out there. Sure, the up-and-coming social networking platforms (like Ning and Pringo Networks) can put the power of deploying a social networking website in the hands of anyone. And, for many, this approach will work extremely well (we’ve launched 5 or 6 Ning networks ourselves!), but sometimes a mass-market solution is only a solution to a mass-market problem. And with the mass-markets being heavily drooled over by the likes of Facebook and mySpace, the smaller markets are becoming king. Small IS the new big when it comes to social networking, apparently, and therefore it matters what platform you use and how many others use the same.

But it’s not just about a more custom social networking site, though. This certainly won’t ensure growth… you can get a social network created free via Ning or you can spend $250k on developing a completely custom monster, but at the end of the day the money you spent doesn’t mean piddly if the rest of the recipe is out-of-wack. In fact, it can’t be narrowed down to your design, your innovative functionalities, or your clever branding either.

It’s: a passionate topic/niche + a vibrant community + an innovative spin on integrating social networking functionalities = a solid platform to build from. Disappointed? If you’re were hoping for the “make it big in social networking” winning formula, I’m sorry to let you down! It’s that same thinking, though, that you MUST fight. There is NO standard formula or method for social networking success. And the problem is, too many are trying to find or build sites using just that kind of thinking!

So… back to reality: how can you build on that solid social networking platform you have? To start:

• Write (or have written) better copy (or different or cooler or sexier or more entertaining)
• Ask different (or more intuitive or funny) profile questions
• Use innovative spins on traditional methods and technology (e.g. a new spin on user dashboards or a new way of searching profiles, etc…)
• Employ unique ways of showing boring data (can stats, rankings, points, stars, levels, thresholds be expanded into remarkable visuals?)
• Be proactive (just because you don’t have to do something doesn’t mean it won’t help in 6 months)
• Make it viral (viruses don’t spread without a method of transmission, neither will your social network)
• Pat them on the back (give your users incentives, rewards, titles, roles, or whatever it will take to pat them on the back and make them feel good about themselves… it’s simple, but it works every time!)

Want more ideas on how you can set apart your social networking website? Then check out the following:

• Social Networking Differentiation
• Ideas for Differentiating a Social Networking Application

Static (e.g. stale) websites are a thing of the past. By adding a widget or two to your website, mySpace page, Facebook profile, eBay store, etc… you can easily and affordably enhance your web presence.

According to Wikipedia, a “web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation. They are derived from the idea of reusable code that has existed for years. Nowadays other terms used to describe web widgets including: gadget, badge, module, capsule, snippet, mini and flake. Web widgets often but not always use DHTML, JavaScript, or Adobe Flash.”

Here’s a list of some of the widget resources out there (e-mail us if you think something should be added to this list!):

• Google Gadgets (”Google Gadgets are miniature web objects that you can copy & paste into your own webpage, for free”)
• Widgetbox (”world’s largest directory and gallery of web widgets”)
• SpringWidgets (”a widget directory for the desktop and the web”)
• Yourminis (”widgets for your blog, website, startpage, and desktop”)
• WordPress Widgets (enhance your WordPress blog with widgets)
• Shopit (”Shopit’s storefront profiles, portable store widgets and networking tools are built for social commerce; use them to buy, sell, trade, or to just promote yourself, anywhere on the web”)
• Cartfly (”you can customize your portable store to fit your business’s look and style; the emphasis is on a simple interface with a fast setup that will help you get your store out and about on the web in no time”)
• Cooqy (”create customizable widgets you can embed in your website, blog or social networking page; the widgets are free for non-eBay web pages; using the widgets on eBay pages such as item listings is free if you have fewer than 500 active listings; it’s $4.95 per month if you have more than that”)
• FormLogix (”FormLogix is an online form builder tool for creating web databases and web forms; forms may be embedded in your website, blog, or may be used internally”)

A note about widget selection: remember, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Exercise care and judgment when choosing your widgets and remember, less is still usually more. So only add a widget or two when it actually enhances and adds value to your web presence instead of distracting or overwhelming your visitors.

Related Reading: Widgets Are The New Black

A Sample Widget: