We're looking for Developers and Community Managers

We've got a new internal project coming up that is going to require senior developers and community managers, based in London. I can't tell you too much about the project, as it will be in stealth mode for the first few months, but it will revolve around community building, social media and social networks. We're putting the team together on paper at the moment, and will be looking to start within the next 2 months.

Developers

We're looking for a senior developer, with at least 4yrs experience in either PHP or ASP.NET. Ideally you should have experience building community or social media applications, and you must have a general interest in social media, and be able to show your involvement in current online communities. You'll be working in a start-up environment alongside at least one other junior developer. Please send your CV and examples of your work to josh[AT]inetworkmarketing.co.uk.

Community Managers

We're looking for a range of sector-specific community managers. Read Jeremiah's post about the Four Tenets of a Community Manager to get an idea of what the job will look like. We're looking for people who've got experience working with large brands in particular sectors or consumer markets, in either PR or Marketing. It doesn't matter at the moment which markets you've worked in. As long as you're passionate about a particular market and have experience in dealing with brands in that area we're interesting in talking with you. Please send your CV and information about what brands you've worked with to josh[AT]inetworkmarketing.co.uk, making sure to include lots of information about your interests outside work - we're looking for people who are already involved with particular communities.

Both of these roles will be London based. Salaries will be competitive, but the main benefit is the fun and responsibility that you'll get for being involved in a high-energy start-up!

If you know anyone that could be good for the roles, please send them our way.

Facebook Page Update

I received a new update from Facebook this morning:

Facebook Pages have some new features available for you:

1. User Photo Uploads
Now, your fans will be able to upload photos to your Facebook Page...if you let them. Go to your Facebook Page and Edit on the Photos box to turn on this feature. All New Pages will have this feature pre-enabled upon creation.

2. Dynamic Content in the Profile Box
You can now replace the main picture on your Facebook Page with dynamic content using either the Flash or FBML applications. Just install either of these applicaitons (find them at www.facebook.com/facebookp

ages and then select the flash/fbml option when you choose to edit your profile picture.)

3. Legal Drinking Age Settings
If you are a bar or alcohol company, you can adjust age settings to meet legal drinking age requirements by clicking edit on your Facebook page, and scrolling down to the settings box.

4. Mini-Feed
Mini-Feed is now movable on the Page. Just click on the word “Mini-feed” and drag it anywhere you please.

What does this mean?

I've written before on the differences between Facebook groups, pages and sponsored groups (and applications). One of the big differences between groups and pages is the ability to have user interaction (e.g. to allow users to upload photos), whilst pages had the advantage of being more customisable. These changes are a big boost for pages, increasing both user interaction and branding ability. Increasing the ability to use Flash & FBML in the main image adds a lot of functionality and interactivity, and the ability to move the mini-feed means that this can flow seamlessly into other bespoke applications for the page.

I see this as a move by Facebook to get more brands to use pages as opposed to application canvas pages as their primary focal point within Facebook. It will be interesting to see how this works out - if a brand wants to have a central branded fan page, and then a number of different 'campaign' applications at different times, then this would be a good choice. However, if a brand wants to create an interactive, engaging community with their own features and communications (which also allows them to be multi-platform, e.g. the Gaia Online applications, which are on Bebo and Facebook, and allow all users to interact in the same world), in many cases applications still provide the best way to do this, in a more cost-effective and efficient way than setting up a unique social network.

The Future of Applications: Branded Engagement and Communities

Recently, Forrester released 'The Connected Agency', in which Peter Kim and Mary Beth Kemp discuss how marketing agencies will change over the next five keys to become community facilitators, acting as the gateway between brands and opt-in interest groups.

This came at a very interesting time for us at iNetwork - within a couple of days from reading the report, we had two clients who wanted almost exactly that - they wanted us to help them build specific interest communities in order to allow selective access to them from relevant brands. More and more, our view of all applications and social media technologies is moving from conversations to communities (at a time when many people are still making the move from statements to conversations):

Statements -----> Conversations -----> Communities

I decided to write this post because despite the great things being written all over the blogosphere about the nature of social network applications, there still seems to be some confusion between old and new media. This has been shown very strongly in the continuing search for CPM in social networks and applications, and the amazed headlines when monetisation doesn't seem to be working that well.

I hate to say this, but MONETISING SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT ABOUT GETTING USERS TO CLICK ON ADS. I seriously believe that companies like RockYou, Slide etc are going to realise that they cannot effectively make money by trying to create applications which have the sole aim of getting users to click somewhere else. I'd bet that they've made the most money where they've offered brands the opportunity to access their 'communities' of users in a meaningful way (e.g. Sony branding up the vampires application for a vampire movie).

Users have been getting sick of gimmicky applications, and so have platforms - note the huge crackdown on application spam by Facebook over the last month. Over the next year, I believe that we're going to see a huge step-change in the industry, and a big move to engaging, community based applications either branded specifically, or giving access to a number of brands. In Shaking the Money Tree of Multi Platform Social Networks, Jia Shen noted that the ratio of success for applications of social networking platforms is higher than for stand-alone platforms. Add that to the easy install and integration with the social graph, and it's clear why applications will continue to be a brilliant platform for engaging with users and interest based communities.

I plan to write more on this, as it's an important topic. 'Adverts' will not go away, and are still relevant when people are searching for information (which can include when they are browsing news sites) - as long as it's relevant. I'd recommend you read the Forrester report, and think about how this can practically apply to your social marketing activities today - not just in 5 years time.

Using Twitter as an Enterprise Tool: Interview with Mukund Mohan

Mukund Mohan is a serial entrepreneur who has gone through a number of successful exits, and is the founder of Best Engaging Communities, a popular blog on business communities and social media. I interviewed him yesterday on how he's used Twitter as an enterprise tool to facilitate a dispersed workforce. The following is a summary of our conversation.

Tell me a bit about the project that you were working on when you decided to use Twitter

We were working on a social media project for just over 9 months, which was eventually sold to Innovis. Because the company had grown through acquisition, we had a very dispersed team, with 46 people spread over 7 US cities, and a small team in London (UK). We needed to keep everyone engaged and in the loop. Initially we were using instant messaging and email to keep in touch, however this was inefficient and created a number of issues: IM was good when the person you needed to speak to was online at their computer, but when this wasn't the case it wasn't very useful, and there was no central record of the discussions that had taken place. Email was being used for more important announcements but with 46 people this resulted in a lot of clutter. Email is also what I call an 'open box' - anyone can send you messages, regardless of whether you want to hear from them or not, which can result in spam and other unwanted or unnecessary emails.

Why did you decide to use Twitter?

I've always been a big fan of Twitter personally, and it solved a lot of these issues. We set up secure accounts for everyone and ensured we were all following each other. This allowed us to have a single, always on discussion, allowing everyone in the company to stay in touch wherever they were, and whatever platform they were using - computer, IM, mobile, etc. We used it for two main functions: status updates, to let each other know where we were (both physically and with regards to projects), and for asking questions, requesting files etc. Someone could post a question at any time, and although there wouldn't always be all 46 of us online, at least a few would, and if they couldn't answer the question either they could pass it on, or when someone came online later they could check through the conversation and help then.

Was there a downside to using Twitter?

Some people felt that it was 'yet another distraction' and that it had the possibility of lowering productivity, especially if you're following or getting involved in conversations that aren't entirely relevant to what you're doing. However, this is less of the case than with IM, as with IM people expect instant responses, but with Twitter there's no expectation of an instant answer.

Would you use it again in the future?

Definitely, I'm actually involved with a new start-up that will be launching within the next month, and we have been using Twitter in exactly the same way to keep everyone in the project up-to-date and to allow the easy flow of questions.

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This is an area which I'm very interested in at the moment. If you have used Twitter in an enterprise situation like the one above, or different, I'd be really interested in hearing from you. Email me at joshATinetworkmarketing.co.uk, and Twitter me at /joshuamarch.

Thank you to Mukund Mohan for his time and answers.

Social Media Café this Morning in London

I spent this morning at the London Social Media Café, in Soho. This is a new 'prototype' event set up by Lloyd Davis, who came up with the idea along with Mike Butcher of TechcrunchUK. It was a really good morning, we packed out the top floor of the Coach and Horses and spent a good 3-4 hours connecting and discussing social media.

I found out about the event through the power of Twitter - I was following Mike Butcher who mentioned this morning that he might be going, I Googled it, found the wiki, Google group, Facebook group, and posts by both Mike and Lloyd and decided to go along.

The concept, still in development, is to find either a café or venue (or series of venues) with free wifi which allow social media types in London to come together to network, co-operate and have meetings. This morning was really about the networking, we're looking for somewhere next with multiple floors so that we can have a floor for working, floor for networking, floor for workshops etc.

There was a really good mix of people there, including Mitch McAlister from MySpace, a host of social media developers, consultants, marketers, investors, analysts, journalists, PR agencies and even civil servants. It's great to see that even the government are recognising the importance of social media in communication. As well as the great connections and loads of new follows on Twitter, I had some in-depth conversations on all aspects of social media, including branded application marketing, Twitter as a discussion tool, and Twitter as an Enterprise Tool. I also had a great conversation with Dan Light of PPC Interactive on how different social media tools are used for different types of relationship and varying levels of closeness.

If you're involved in social media in the UK and want to meet some like minds and get involved in the conversation, then join the groups and come along, it's a great event. Also, if you've got good venue suggestions or are interested in sponsoring the event then get in touch with Lloyd (link above), or you can contact me and I'll pass it on.

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UPDATE:

I do feel a bit guilty for not mentioning Thayer's truffles - these were pure coco and Trinidadian rum, and were quite simply amazing, honestly the most gorgeous chocolates I've ever had the pleasure of eating. Unfortunately she's refusing requests to go into production, and will only create them for occasional social media cafés - a big incentive to go to every single one, just in case.

Enterprise Twitter? An exciting idea (to me)

After my post last night in response to Matt Dickman I became quite excited about the possibilities of an enterprise version of Twitter, not just as a potential customer services tool as described in my last post, but also as a team/department/company wide communication tool. It could be hosted securely by a company, with company wide channels, department channels and individual team channels which could be made secure. It would allow easy communication to employees via the company wide and department channels, with the chance of real dialogue as employees respond. Teams could set up channels for projects with SMS notifications to allow them to keep everyone in the loop all the time, especially useful if the team is distributed.

Because Twitter is always on, and allows the whole team (or even whole company) to remain connected, it has a big advantage over other IM systems.

I can definitely see the value of this for companies - could be a good monetisation route for Twitter as well.

What do you think?

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UPDATE

I've been getting some replies on Twitter with regard to using Twitter as an enterprise tool, in its current format:
mukund @joshuamarch - saw your enterprise twitter post; we used it at a prev company for status update (given that everyone was in multiple geos)

Have you used Twitter as an enterprise tool in this way? Let me know

Twitter: Customer Service? I don't think so

Recently, Matt Dickman wrote about how Twitter is the 'ultimate customer service tool'. I'm a fan of Matt's blog, and understand what he is saying, however I must disagree with him. As someone who's run customer service focused businesses (I've been in retail) I know that when customers have a problem, they want to speak to a real person, as easily and quickly as possible, either immediately by phone or via a quick response by direct email. They don't want to have to fill in forms online, they don't want to have to read a FAQ first, and they don't want to have to learn something new just to ask a question.

Matt argues that for advanced customer service companies, Twitter is excellent as it always fast and community based dialogue. However, for any company of scale customer service is a serious issue, possibly with a continuous stream of calls, emails, letters etc. These have to be dealt with in a methodical way in order to ensure that every query is dealt with promptly and correctly, by the right person. In my opinion Twitter cannot deliver as a customer service tool because:

1. Most customers would have to learn how to use it first
2. It would require them to sign up to something new just to ask a question
3. They would see their query being lost in a huge flow of others
4. It's very difficult to methodically track individual queries and responses
5. As a company scales the amount of queries could be way beyond what's feasible on a single twitter stream
6. The platform is outside of your control and could go down leaving a major customer services issue.

However, in Matt's most recent post he discusses the importance of listening to the conversation, and shares some great tools to enable this on Twitter. I am completely in agreement with him on this - Twitter is probably the best discursive tool out there, allowing for multiple 1-1 and 1-many conversations at a very high level, and a brilliant community tool. If you're looking to get into the conversation, and become part of it, then Twitter is unparalleled, especially in the social media field.

Of course, there may be a possible future enterprise incarnation of Twitter enabled for customer service, giving multiple channels and multiple authors, and allowing users to post questions without registering, possibly with companies hosting the service themselves. This could be an interesting way of monetising the application, and could very well prove Matt right.

Fast Company becomes social network

FastCompany.com have revamped their web presence to become a community site. I logged on this morning and created a profile, you can see me here. Its the first time a 'mainstream' media site has gone social in this way, and it could be very interesting. We deal with some big media clients, and some of them are actually terrified of what social media and citizen journalism could do to their business. By getting users involved in this way media sites can stay relevant and monetize their content effectively whilst embracing social media without fear.

Jeremiah has written a very good initial analysis of the site here which I recommend you check out. Especially important is his comment on the focus on editorial content. As he says, this is the reason that we go to media websites, otherwise where's the differentiation from groups, forums and other social networks?

Flocking & Twittering

I'm feeling extremely social today. I've been playing with Flock, the social browser, which I'm very, very impressed with. My Facebook friend feed is down the side, making it very easy to keep in touch with what's going on and to communicate with friends, and easy to follow my closest friends photo uploads. If I'm on a website I like, I can click the star next to the address to open up the favourites toolbar to automatically post to delicious, with any tags I want. If I want to share the link with a friend, I can drag it to their Facebook image, post the link to my profile, or email it to someone with a simple click of a button. I've integrated blogspot, so now to blog I just click the blog button and a quick box comes up for me to write my post.

It's all pretty exciting.

Of course, there's a few issues (e.g. no alignment formatting in the blog editor), but I'm very much looking forward to 1.1.

As if this wasn't enough, I've finally signed up to twitter (before this I've just been RSS'ing interesting feeds), which has had me very excited all day. I wasn't too impressed with the Twitter feed for Flock, so looked around for clients and decided on Twitterific which I'm very impressed with (I'm a Mac user). I also added Twitterberry for my blackberry (unlimited dataplan, limited SMS), which does the job but isn't anything special. My twittername is joshuamarch

What do you guys use? Have you tried out flock? What's your favourite Twitter client?

MySpace Platform Launch (London)

I was at the London launch of the MySpace platform launch party yesterday evening, with MySpace CTO Aber Whitcomb, Senior president of Technology Jim Benedetto, and Country Manager for the UK Anthony Lukom, among others from the MySpace Team. 

It was a good event, with an introduction into the platform, a quick look at the basic set of APIs available and how it would work for developers, then it was mainly down to individual chats and questions to the team. One of the interesting features of the MySpace platform is the additional application space, on the users private homepage. This will make certain features much simpler and easier for users, for example notifications, RSS feeds, instant messaging etc, which at the moment (on Facebook and Bebo) must really be done through the canvas pages to be effective. They also confirmed that flash will work fine on profile boxes, which is a step ahead of Facebook and may allow for some more interesting features. 

They also verified that there would be NO manual authorisation of applications, and no value test (although all applications will automatically go through something called CAJA to check Javascript and remove any dangerous code).  

I had a really good chat with Allen Hurff, VP of Engineering, about the platform in general and some specifics. We discussed the >18 and >21 FBML tags recently introduced by Facebook, which is really relevant to some of our clients who don't want to get caught up in engaging with users too young for their services, and Allen confirmed that all applications on the MySpace platform will be able to be tagged as >16 >18 or >21. Despite some peoples claims that this is going to lead to porn (which is against the terms of service of these platforms anyway, duh), these are very useful for brands who target older consumers, for example the drinks industry, who don't want to be seen to be encouraging young drinkers, and of course the social networks themselves who don't want to be seen to be helping this. 

The Flock team were there showing off their 'social web browser', complete with MySpace integration. This looked very, very cool - the social side bar shows whatever social sites you've logged into, and has your friend list there with latest updates at the top, your status updates which you can change through the side bar, and this works automatically once you log in to a site. It also works for Twitter, Flickr etc. One of the very cool features is the easy media sharing and browsing - for example, you can load up all of a friends photos and media into a 'top bar', browse and share this with other people or services, and if you see media you like you can simply drag this onto a friend's photo and it will automatically write the html, links etc into a message to that person on whatever service. 

It will be interesting to see if they add application support at somepoint, so that users can use social network applications straight through the browser. We'll see! 

I'm going to be downloading it and giving it a try, I think it's a great idea and if it increases social network usage all the better for us social media hacks!

MySpace applications: must pass value test

A source within MySpace informed me yesterday that applications must pass a test on 'value' before they're allowed to be seeded within MySpace - they must be of 'genuine value to users'. I haven't got the specifics of this test, or how exactly this will be decided, but it's a different approach to Facebook, Bebo et al who essentially allow the users to decide. 

This is an interesting approach, obviously an attempt to prevent some of the spam that has mired Facebook since they opened up their application. It will be interesting to see whether they consider value to be content/tools/games only, and if they prevent applications like vampires/zombies etc. 

It will be interesting to see how this works out. With over 15,000 applications on Facebook, they would have to put in some serious man hours to test every application. 

I personally think that the best method is to be completely open, but with strict rules on spam, much like Facebook are now introducing - e.g. only allowing newsfeed stories to be published when a user has actively interacted with an application, not passively. 

I'll report on this more when the platform launches properly so we can see how it actually works in practice.