The Facebook Nation

Hi,

here is an article dealing with Facebook's influence in politics and the boundaries to it.

Marginals vs Centrals

Hey,

the study about the communication in Kibbutz I mentioned today in class was acctually not done by Granovetter but by Weimann. Sorry, I confused something there.

The link is unfortunately in German but I am going to summarize the main idea. Weimann observed the communication in Kibbutz and devided the people into three groups: marginals, centrals and others. The centrals are very dominat in the intragroup communication and have - not surprisingly- a lot of strong ties within the group. The marginals are not very important for the intragroup communication but have weak ties to other groups in the Kibbutz and therefore are very important for the intergroup communication. The centrals are so connected within their group that they are not connected with people from other Kibbutz. So the marginals are important to retrieve information from the outside. The type of information was divided in three different groups: romour, news, product information.

Another interesting point is that without the marginals the influence of the centrals would be limited to their own group but through the ties of the marginals to other groups they widen their influence.

In my opinion this study underlines the importance of loose or so called weak ties and that is after all what we often have in social networks. Therefore social networks seem to be the ideal way of retrieving new information.

See you guys

Felix

http://books.google.de/books?id=yqNu-x1VsMgC&pg=PA136&lpg=PA136&dq=Weimann+1982+kibbutz&source=bl&ots=VoyePWsPAS&sig=06BqDuWdG3dMhlkAYuCW_O5GrLc&hl=de&ei=NaDWTobjGMzPsAbf36j9Aw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

Social Media and Hierarchy of Needs

from: The Social Media & Personal Branding Blog

The Social Media Hierarchy of Needs

Posted on February 6, 2010 | 18 Comments

Have you ever wondered about the reasons behind the success of social media? What made Facebook become a $10 Billion business? Why does Facebook have more than 350 million users? Why do you have over 3 million images uploaded on Flickr every day? Why are over 900,000 thousand blogs posted daily? More than 45 million status updates per day are recorded on Facebook, more than 27 million tweets on Twitter, and more than 1 billion videos are served on Youtube in the same time frame (Source – Internet 2009 in numbers). What is behind all that success? The answer lies in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs!
Psychologist Abraham Maslow first introduced his concept of a hierarchy of needs in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” and his subsequent book, “Motivation and Personality”. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is often displayed as a pyramid. The lowest levels of the pyramid are made up of the most basic needs, while the more complex needs are located at the top of the pyramid – starting off with Physiological needs, then Safety, Love & Belonging, Self-Esteem, and finally, Self Actualization needs. This hierarchy suggests that people are motivated to fulfill basic needs before moving on to other needs. So how is that related to Social Media?
I have created a replica of Maslow’s pyramid and tied it in to social media.

Similar to Maslow’s pyramid, in the social media counterpart we have to complete our “basic needs” before moving up to our “social needs” ultimately reaching our social optimization. Are your basic needs in sync with your social media needs? Where do you stand and what are you doing to move upwards? If you’re still having trouble understanding social media, maybe you should consider your needs and what you need to do to fulfill them. Think About It!

Initial Findings of the Consulting Firm Case Study

Dear All

Here are my initial findings from the Consulting Firm Case study:

1. The requirements are to cross-train resources both in the US and the Europe region (flexible and agile).

2. Need to identify key resources in the organization who can become the key drivers and enablers of this change process. Early adopters have a huge role to play in the change process. Hence, they need to be carefully shortlisted by the Management.

3. I don't say that we have 100% data to start with. However, I feel that we may not need 100% data to start our initial analysis for the given task. Once, the change control board is identified there could/would be few other unknowns which can/will surface to give a new dimension to the problem/solution. So, my recommendation is to take phased actions to ensure that we are atleast moving to the next stage of the unknown.

Having stated the objectives above, here are a few data points which I think that would/could be useful in our initial phase of going ahead with the implementation:

1. Identification of the Key Levers/Players in the Organization in terms of communciation / information-flow. Please refer to the below shot for their names:

2. Identification of the key enablers/bridges between the Practice Areas and Regions. These are potential key players for the Change Control Board. Please refer to the below shot for their names:

3. Also, the Management needs to identify the sources from where the crucial organizational information is not coming up the hierarchy (eventually resulting in Management oversight). The datapoints with a lower alpha attenuation have been considered for the same. With this information in hand, Management can develop a framework to increase the alpha attenuation levels (eventually resulting in better performance).Please refer to the below shot for their names:

These are my initial findings on the assignment. Please feel free to discuss or comment on the same.

See you tomorrow!

Cheers!

Manish

Social Media – Innovation Prize 2011 for Deutsche Bank

Bank of America’s Google Plus Page Appears ‘Brandjacked’

From Social Networks to Collaboration Networks -IDEAS FOR LEADERS

Social networking intro

Leveraging Social Networking for Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing: Strategy to Commerce
Lee Odden
For companies trying to make sense of social media and online marketing, it’s important to take a step back from all the “TwitFaceBlogTubeIn” mania for a second and look at the nature of how these things are going to work for the overall business.

There are many questions that need answers: ”Should we develop a strategy first before engaging?”, ”Should we experiment and develop a strategy as we go?”, “Will it ever be OK to ask customers if they want to buy directly within social channels or will we always have to tiptoe around the subject?”

Here are a few considerations to help answer those questions and establish the framework for a sustainable and successful social media marketing program.

Social Media Strategy: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. Having some idea of what measurable goals and business outcomes you’re after is essential for planning resources and forecasting outcomes. This is true with any kind of marketing and is certainly the case with social media.

I polled a number of industry smarties on social media strategy vs. tactics and while there was some distance between the approach Guy Kawasaki preferred and that of people like Chris Brogan, the consensus was that developing an approach is essential for planning, implementation, accountability and measurement of success.

The formation of a social media strategy is a ripe opportunity for creativity and certainly shouldn’t get in the way of getting started. Gaining consensus about social strategy within a corporation could easily create a bottleneck. A strategy that calls for experimentation with iterative improvement in the context of overall goals, approach, tactics, audience and an effort to measure success is more likely to be implemented and gain support.

Social Media Marketing Tactics: The best mix of tactics needs to tie into the plan for reaching business goals. Whether it’s “Better engage with our customers” to “Filling the top of the sales funnel”, an understanding of audience preferences and behaviors will lead to the right tactical mix.

A lot of companies take the path of least resistance and go for what I like to call, “The Social 5-Pack” of: Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, YouTube and LinkedIn without thinking through tactics. For example, one common question often I hear is, “Is a LinkedIn group a better use of time and resources or a Facebook Fan Page?”

What the marketer might want to ask is, “Where do social networking vs. blogging vs. microcontent vs. media sharing fit in the context of our social media goals?” Then do the research and implement a listening program to discover which social networks, media sharing sites or blogging communities the target audience is present and participating in. That homework will answer the question about Facebook vs. LinkedIn and any other social communities where customers spend time.

Social Media Process: “Companies who start with implementation are at risk”, is a great quote from Jeremiah Owyang in his recent post, “A Pragmatic Approach to Social Business“. There he lists a checklist of 8 steps that form a process for approaching social media. Jumping into tactics can send a company in a very unproductive direction. Working through a strategy, tactics and developing processes leads to efficiencies, scalability and social engagement that is true to the business goals.

We’ve published a social media checklist that can serve as a prompt for companies to gather the information necessary to make smarter decisions about how their organizations can incorporate social media in their marketing and communications mix.

Process with social media marketing is important for a variety of reasons ranging from quality assurance to accountability. How can an organization scale its social media efforts without some kind of processes in place? Redundant processes can often be automated by software. Processes also outlive internal social media subject matter experts who move on to other opportunities.

From a personal process perspective, take a look at Tac Anderson’s daily routine as a social media strategist, which he calls a “workout”. In addition to planned activities and tactics, there’s room for putting out fires or handing spontaneous situations. In the end, a routine or process helps keep social media marketing tactics on track over time.

Social Commerce: Social Media that Leads to Sales: Question - What’s the ROI of Social Media? Answer – What’s the ROI of having a phone system in your office? That phone systems facilitates communications for a wide variety of reasons that are important to the functioning of the business from product/service inquiries to hiring new employees to customer service.

Social media in a business sense, is technology that facilitates communications, sharing and connecting brands with customers. For the most part, people buy from those they like and social media helps build, maintain and improve those relationships.

So how does social media influence or result in sales? A helpful post on BarnRaisers summarizes several studies that show exactly that. Click on the link to see the post (How Social Media Drives Sales Relationships). I’ll also summarize them here:

Facebook - “The top reasons people press the “Like” button on Facebook is to have a sales relationship with a brand - either to receive promotions & coupons (40%), get updates on upcoming sales (30%) and show their support for companies (39%).” – ExactTarget 2010.

Twitter - “For over 40% of the time people are on Twitter, we spend it learning about products and services, listening to what others have to say and giving opinions. That explains why over 20% of the time we’re on Twitter, we’re ready and willing to buy directly off Twitter.” – Edison Research 2010.

Social Networks – “For every hour we spend on online, we spend the most amount of time on social networks, almost 15 minutes of every hour. Roughly half of the time (approx 6+ mins), we are seeking out products and services and looking to have a sales relationship with brands.” Nielsen 2010.

As more brands include commercial offers in the social experience they provide for customers, those customers will become increasingly comfortable with the notion of social commerce. At the same time, more social features are being added to ecommerce websites. In the way that blogs and Twitter accounts are expected features of brand websites, so will social commerce functionality.

Building a flexible strategy that considers business goals and the people to engage will help marketers identify the best mix of tactics for their social media marketing program. Developing processes from a corporate and an individual standpoint will help sustain, not stifle, social engagement activities in the long run. Start by building community and relationships. Listen, respond and create value. Monitor and analyze for opportunities to implement social commerce features, but don’t rush it.

How have you incorporated social media into your business processes? What are you doing to create more sustainable social participation within your organization?

Social Networking for Small Businesses

Written by Daniel Travis – Brown

Promoting your small business online can be a massive contributing factor to an increase in traffic and sales to your company website. As time has progressed social networking website have encouraged millions onto the internet; the total number of worldwide internet users has grown by 480.4% since the year 2000 with the latest count clocking an amazing 2,095,006,005!

The world has become more connected than ever before and with social networking sites being used daily by users across the globe who are able to share and link information to each other, what better place to promote your products or services?

Look at the tools you have at your disposal on Facebook alone; you can have people ‘like’ your company, social status updates and a whole range of other posts you may choose to make. This is massively useful; someone who sees a friend of theirs has ‘liked’ a particular product or post is far more likely to click it and check it out themselves.

Facebook promotions are a fantastic means of reaching out to a potentially limitless audience, so be sure to give the people on your ‘friends’ list a reason to ‘like’ your page or product. Promote a prize giveaway; a lucky user will be picked from the list of people who like your page or request to add you to their ‘friends’ list. From this their friends may be drawn to your profile and decide to enter the competition too; and so on.Let’s assume we own a company that sells bathroom suites ; we have a new range of whirlpool baths in stock and we want to promote these products as much as possible. A great starting point is to ensure our own company website (let’s call it dannysbathrooms.com; not the greatest domain but you get my point) is full of great content and we’re displaying our new whirlpool baths nice and clearly on the appropriate page. Now any posts we make on Facebook about these baths can be linked to our whirlpool baths page on dannysbathrooms.com.

Now we encourage our friends to like our page with our competition; which in turn will inevitably draw in Facebook users from each of their friends list, if they view our profile and spot the easy-to-enter competition they are almost certainly going to enter at the price of clicking a ‘like’ button. While our Facebook page is popular we can use this opportunity to drop some posts about whirlpool baths and other possible sales and discounts with a link though to dannysbathrooms.com.

Remember to interact with any ‘friends’ that comment on our page. Don’t be too serious, if they wish to engage you in conversation or make an enquiry about a product then give them what they want. This will also help to humanise our brand and make us more appealing to any new visitors on our profile.

Remember, build some serious hype around your social network profile then drop links to great offers or new products you have on offer. Give incentives to gain extra likes and in turn, extra followers and friends; these tactics can work just as well on twitter but you’ll have to be a little more smart with your posts as you have a limited character count on your posts.

Will the Future of Social Business Networking be Google, Facebook?

By J. Angelo Racoma (@jangelo) Nov 18, 2011

An interesting question crops up time and again: Will today's major social networks turn to the enterprise market in the future? Business-oriented social networks are already popular among organizations and companies. But as Facebook and Google+ run out of markets to grow into, they will need to find more growth areas from within, and the enterprise is one big market ripe for the picking.

Technology evangelist Robert Scoble thinks that Google+ and Facebook are headed toward the enterprise social networking business sometime in the future. Speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, CA, Scoble says there is big potential for the likes of Google+ and Facebook for use as internal corporate communication networks. Popular public social networks are already being used by professionals as communication tools, whether or not their respective companies already run their own enterprise social network, so there's no reason for either Google or Facebook to not turn to these markets.

Social Networking as an Extension of Google Apps

In terms of integrating enterprise services with social networking, Google may be in the best position, with its enterprise Google Apps offering and Google+. Google's SaaS email, documents, chat and web CMS platform will be a good mix with a private implementation of Google+. Google may already be looking into attracting businesses into joining Google+, although not as a private network. The social networking service recently opened its doors to business use, with the introduction of Google+ Pages for brands and businesses. As a private social network, the Circles way of sharing content and sorting friends might fit perfectly with the needs of a private social network.

More Than Just Numbers

Meanwhile, for Facebook, the need to consider private business-oriented networks might come as more of a necessity than innovation. Facebook is already at about 800 million active users and growing. But at some point, Facebook will run out of an Internet-using population to expand into. As such, the company will need to focus within its existing user base and provide more value-added services to remain relevant. Scoble said that Facebook is "going to have to convince people to do more on the service," which will be a smarter way to make money than simply growing its audience.

In the end, it's a matter of finding the right timing, hiring the right people and doing it the right way. Scoble thinks Facebook will have an advantage in terms of hiring the right talent to convert the network into an enterprise-grade offering. Until then, Google and Facebook will need to heavily invest in turning their networks into an enterprise-collaboration platform, which may be best beta-tested through internal use. The prediction: Google is likely to launch Google+ for enterprise by 2012 and Facebook by early 2013.

New Trends in Social Networking

Found article below from Starr Hall, who is an international speaker, author, publicist and social networking expert. She's the CEO of StarrHall.com, a consulting and training company based in Avila Beach, Calif.


Just when you thought you had Twitter down, a basic understanding of LinkedIn and you finally know how to upload a video to YouTube, I present my take on social trends that are on the horizon next year. From plug-ins to location-based marketing initiatives to the move to higher bandwidth, there's change afoot in the world of social media.
I've compiled these 10 trends from my own observations, the opinions of my fan base online and other experts. Consider this a starting point for what to incorporate in your own social-media strategies in the New Year.
1. Location-Based Marketing: Location services will grow in popularity as people get more comfortable checking in to a business. This will be the result of enhanced safety features -- such as privacy options that block your location from public view -- and more enticing brand offers.It's time to acquaint yourself with sites and applications such as Foursquare, Facebook Places and Gowalla. These sites will help you better target prospects' likes and interests, pique interest and influence purchase decisions by offering discounts, promotions or giveaways when they “check in” to your business.
2. Video Platforms: YouTube might be one of the largest user-generated video-sharing sites on the Internet today, but other platforms will begin to surface that are more business-focused, easier to market videos on and not as crowded. Sites like Viddler, Vimeo and Dailymotion will gain momentum with a stronger focus on live streaming on sites such as interactive broadcast platform Ustream, or streaming straight from blogs.
3. Text Campaigns: As the mobile arena grows, small businesses will continue to move marketing campaigns to mobile phones. MessageBuzz and Enowit offer tiered levels of service and free demo accounts that allow you to test a mobile-marketing campaign. Start by incorporating a mobile widget onto your site to help collect mobile numbers through an automated system and create campaigns specific to area codes or regions.
4. For Cause Tweet-a-thons: A Tweet-a-thon is a fundraising campaign on Twitter for which users encourage their followers to tweet about and donate to a particular charitable cause over a specific period of time. These initiatives will gain in popularity as savvy entrepreneurs capitalize on the relationship-building advantages of social media and the good publicity that comes with giving back.
I recommend you choose a cause for 2011 and keep your campaign simple. An excellent book with how-to information and ideas on how to tweet successfully is Unmarketing: Stop Marketing, Start Engaging by Scott Stratten, president of the marketing firm Unmarketing.
5. The Move to Higher Bandwidth (4G): Say goodbye to 3G. The use of higher bandwidth will not only be a necessity but a demand from busy consumers.
Widely becoming recognized with carriers such as Sprint and soon to be Verizon, 4G speed allows marketers to get the message out faster with quicker download times. Jump on this bandwidth wagon early and incorporate it into your 2011 marketing plan.
6. Wordpress-Based Websites: Open source publishing application Wordpress will become the platform of choice. Why? It makes it easier for websites to implement search-engine optimization at little to no cost with plug-ins, which add specific capabilities to software applications.
To stay competitive, I recommend that you consider moving your website to a Wordpress platform. These sites are user-friendly and do not require knowledge of HTML code.
7. Plug-ins: The use of plug-ins will proliferate, with thousands of new options surfacing monthly.
An increasingly popular plug-in is Scribe which monitors and scores your keywords and updates to your site automatically to increase results with your search-engine optimization.
8. Review Sites: Websites dedicated to customer reviews will dominate the social media landscape. Consumers want to be heard, and more importantly they want answers. Sites such as Groubal.com, will achieve this by consolidating common user-submitted complaints and presenting those petitions to businesses, demanding answers for their wrongdoings. Consumers are even creating blogs specifically about teaching people how to complain effectively.
This is another reason to monitor conversations about your products and services online. Moving into 2011, make sure you have a plan for how to respond to positive and negative reviews. Remember to respond immediately. Reviews will start to spread like wildfire with these sites.
9. Monitoring Conversations: Show your customers you're listening and responding. Make it a New Year's resolution to set up online monitors for your company.
You can choose social-media dashboards or keyword-alert services. There are paid dashboards such as Radian6 and ObjectiveMarketer as well as free service sites Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. These dashboards not only allow you to monitor but participate in live conversations.
If you haven’t set up Google monitors yet, they're free. Go to www.google.com/alerts.
10. Presentation Platforms: As teleseminars become overused and tired, interactive web seminar platforms will step in to fill that market need.
New presentation platforms such as SlideRocket.com and Prezi.com are incorporating easy-to-build presentation tools with social media, live feeds and video. People online want to see the presenter, not just listen over a bridge line.
Choose your presentation platform for 2011 and make sure that it not only streams well but also allows for immediate interaction and cutting-edge presentation tools.

Article about Supporting Knowledge Creation and Sharing in Social Networks

Article about social Network and knowledge sharing in organizations

Six degrees of separation? Think again

Very interesting new research on the narrowing distance between us all, thanks to Facebook.

Below you will find an article from the Wall Street Journal. My Lebanese friend Mark, created an application for iphone that allows people to capture and immediately send out a "Signal" about an event that is taking place before their eyes. Check it out and make sure to download the app! 

Signal - The new iphone application!