LinkedIn launched their blog in April 2007. One year later, how are they doing regarding community evangelism and social media participation?
I’ve set up a simple survey which I hope you’ll take a minute to fill out. For additional background if you’re interested, see my post at Linked Intelligence.
I could go into a long explanation about legal liability, etc., but Jeremiah Owyang said it perfectly on Twitter today:
Many bloggers I know prefer a blogging policy at work, as it helps to distinguish where the guardrails are.
From Jim Turner on Twitter:
Is it just my imagination or does Twitter sometimes ‘eat’ your tweets? Must [have] a ‘tweet tooth’ or something.
I have two new social media addictions thanks to SXSW. The first is Twitter (more on that in another post, but in the meantime, you can follow me); the second is Bitstrips.
Simply put, Bitstrips is a Web 2.0 application for creating comic strips. It enables people like me who have no artistic talent, but occasionally observe or think of something funny, to have a nicely-rendered visual expression of it. But what makes it really compelling is the social aspect of it.
For starters, you can create a character to represent yourself:
| This is me | This is me on Bitstrips |
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Then you can connect with existing friends and use their characters in your strips. For example, I figured bLaugh creator Chris Pirillo would be interested in this, so I thought I’d drop him a line to tell him about it. Needless to say, he was already there and highly active:
You can also create characters representing your friends and then invite them to join.
Once you’ve done all that you can use your friends’ characters and the characters they’ve created to make strips of funny things that happened in real life. And before anyone gives me grief about this next strip, I’ll say that a) it’s a slight exaggeration, b) I cleared it with the star of it before publishing it (”Oh man, you could’ve made it WAY more unflattering than that. It’s perfect!!!!”), and c) no, the guys in the background aren’t any specific people - y’all go make your own!
You can also make images of celebrities. And you can edit your friends’ strips (well, not actually edit, but create copies of theirs which you can then edit):
Of course, including your friends and family in comic strips may not always go over well:
It’s incredibly fun to create the strips, and incredibly funny to read them. I also love that they build the tutorials in the application itself, for example:
They even use it to communicate company news:
That said, it is a 1.0 product, and it has, shall we say, quite a few shortcomings, such as:
Limited range of expressions…
Shortage of people who are actually funny…
Characters can only be human…
Lacking some seemingly obvious essential props, like musical instruments…
And phones…
Fortunately, they’re working on it…
Of course, some people have come up with some pretty creative solutions in the meantime (in case you’re wondering, that’s a stack of tables in the back)…
Well, that’s my review. Now just to think up an idea for my next strip…
Oh yeah… if you decide to check it out, feel free to add me as a friend.
In case you were ever wondering what social networking sites are popular around the world, here’s a graphical representation (click image for larger version):
United Online (Nasdaq: UNTD) is scrapping its IPO plans for Classmates Media, which includes social networking pioneer Classmates.com and the popular MyPoints consumer loyalty site. What particularly called my attention to this was the analysis of it over at Fool.com by
It didn’t hurt that Classmates.com is considered a social-networking pioneer, at a time when News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) is laughing its way to the bank on its MySpace purchase, and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is bankrolling a suspicious investment that values Facebook at a whopping $15 billion.
Investors weren’t born yesterday. They didn’t need an Ivy League college degree to know that pioneer badges can be worthless. So what if Classmates predates MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, or Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) Orkut? If rings around the bark are all that mattered, Friendster and Tribe.net would be Wall Street rock stars.
…
Classmates blew it long before the IPO got shelved this morning. The site was in the right place at the right time, but it was positioned the wrong way. Instead of embracing the open-ended ways of the real stars of social networking, Classmates spent too much time as a walled community with little to offer those who weren’t willing to pay for access. The site had amassed user registrations 50 million deep over the years, but just a sliver of those were paying customers and active participants.
Here’s what I wrote in The Emergence of The Relationship Economy regarding Classmates and freemium business models:
Many users have criticized Classmates’ highly restrictive free functionality, which allows members to establish profiles, search for other members, and read public message boards; posting messages or contacting other members requires a premium membership. Other sites with similar models, such as Ecademy, have garnered similar criticism. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this business model, it does generate more customer ill will than those with less restrictive free membership functionality.
We recommend that unless compelling ROI can be demonstrated in other ways, companies offer a free level of basic membership that has sufficient functionality to keep people engaged on an ongoing basis. This not only creates customer goodwill but also generally offers increased value to premium members by having a larger pool of engaged users available for search and interaction.
Here’s the ironic part… Classmates knew this was a problem — they just didn’t know what to do about it. Take a look at this excerpt from their S-1 filing:
Although we have recently experienced an increase in the number of paying subscribers, this trend may not continue. Most of our paying subscribers elect to purchase our services as a result of a limited number of features. For example, we believe that our recently introduced Classmates digital guestbook feature is responsible for a significant portion of the increase in our new pay accounts since the end of 2006. If our social networking pay features are not as compelling and we do not stay current with evolving consumer trends, our free members may not subscribe for our pay features. Any decrease in our conversion rate of free members into paying subscribers could adversely affect our business and financial results.
This is a perfect example of why understanding the marketplace and what users will and won’t accept is so critical. Not getting this right has cost Classmates millions.
I’m happy to be participating at a Software and Information Industry Association lunch /webcast on October 31 in midtown New York, on “The Promises and Risks of Social Networking in the Information Industry”.
The event is on “how your enterprise can profit from social networking: in promotion and marketing, in the development of new products and content creation, and even by making communities one of the services your business offers as an ancillary to content products.”
The other panelists are:
Leslie Forde, VP of Strategic Alliances, Communispace;
Kim Kobza, President and CEO, Neighborhood America;
Scott Parry, General Manager, Reuters Advicepoint
Karen Christensen, CEO, Berkshire Publishing Group will moderate.
Some of the questions that will be addressed include:
• How can we make our communities persistent and sustainable?
• What increases the value of a community to its participants?
• What social media are appropriate for my business?
• Does it really make sense to use existing free social networking communities like Facebook and Second Life?
• Can we develop our own unique social networking systems with open source technologies?
The event costs $50 for non-SIIA members. Alternatively, the event will be available via webcast. Register here.
More and more we’re seeing this trend in social media… revenue sharing with the social media and social networking content providers who are really the ones bringing eyeballs to these sites. The latest really cool addition to this that I’ve discovered is TheNewsRoom.
TheNewsRoom allows you to embed individual stories or a player featuring multiple stories, like the one you see to the right, on your site. Then they embed advertising within the player and you get a revenue share from it. What’s especially interesting about this is a couple of things.
First, small publishers generally haven’t had free and easy access to this kind of content in the past. In fact, you’ve generally had to pay for it. Secondly, this advertising is CPM advertising, not CPC. In other words, you get paid for impressions, not clicks. Again, this is something that has been largely unavailable to smaller publishers.
The site is in beta, and while so far everything I’ve used has worked well, the user interface leaves much to be desired, and the training videos they have aren’t consistent with the current user interface. Also, the ability to create a player with multiple stories like the one at right is currently limited to video features, not all content on the site. I’m sure that will come soon, but for now it’s just video.
Here’s another thing that’s very cool about it… it’s viral, and you get paid for the viral effect. In the player on the right, you’ll see a “Mash” button, which will allow you to post that story to your own site. Whenever someone mashes a story onto their site from your player, you get paid on that too, though at a lower rate.
Anyway, I’ve hand-picked some interesting video stories about social networking into this player — I hope you enjoy.
Shara Karasic is an online community consultant and currently the Community Manager for Work.com (where I’m Community Leader for the Sales & Marketing Channel). Shara is a heavy user of social networking / social media sites (she maintains an extensive, up-to-date list here).
Shara was recently interviewed for Tech PR War Stories about social media strategies and sites PR professionals should be exploring for their clients.
Download and listen to the interview here (16:05 MP3)
Work.com has a ton of how-to guides on social media and social networking you might want to check out:
Robert Peck of Bear Stearns recently presented on the theme “Yahoo should buy Facebook“, with a rough valuation of Facebook. I have to admit my skepticism of this argument. Yahoo has a history of not taking advantage of its acquisitions (Broadcast.com…).
Far cheaper than buying Facebook would be to provide a systematically integrated user experience across all of those different brands. Most noteably, Yahoo owns Yahoo Groups, which to this day has one of the most active user bases of any online community. There are roughly 6 million Yahoo groups, with an average of perhaps 10 users each, and many of those users (including me) are not impressed with the quality of their current user experience. (The 6 million figure comes from Jeff Weiner of Yahoo, but the figure of 10 users each is only a rough estimate.)
Yahoo already has tremendous reach and many of the most noteworthy brands in the Web 2.0 space (Flickr, Delicious, etc.). Integrating all of these brands is a mammoth missed opportunity.
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