Is social networking just getting warmed up?

Pretty much every seasoned web user has an account with at least one of the popular social networks, like MySpace, Facebook, Hi5 and LinkedIn.

There are countless more such networks and the trend seems to be reaching every niche one can possibly imagine.

It’s a good thing because the more people work together, the faster we can achieve great things but then again, not all social networks vye to reinvent a better world as most of them are just endless streams of largely useless chatter where people interact without actually attempting to truly connect.

Not all communications have to be meaningful to be interesting for those engaging in it but it can seem like a lot of lost energy to fuel such large networks that basically amount to nothing. But that’s irrelevant, in a way, because millions of people still stampede towards these “rate me if you like me” type of social networks so in itself, there has to be a genuine need underneath all that digital noise.

So people, from the world over, are assisting to the rise of the social networks.

In and of itself, that’s big but is this a prelude to something even bigger or is social networking as we know it as good as it’s going to get?

That’s an excellent question and while nobody can say for sure, the featureset of a typical social network pretty much engulfs everything else with Twitter-like streams, blogs, forums, friend rings and chats, all packed into a single web destination which feels coherent to the user. So, featurewise, social networks pack quite a punch. Not all the features are as developed as “single application scripts” but to the user, that seems to matter very little as all they see is the feature itself and not the technology supporting it.

Social networking has everything to do with the cloud where the size and speed of hosting appears to be somewhat infinite, from a user’s standpoint. It’s probably the web 2.0 most compelling spinoff since a social network is often the place where people finally settle after looking at all sorts of other web services.

And since online social networking is generally free, millions of people just open up an account figuring it’s a good deal. Over time, some build up very rich offerings in their “social realm” and others never return after signing-up. The social networks nevertheless connect hundreds of millions of people daily for business and pleasure.

Among the niche-type social networks to watch out for, the following cities now have their own job-centric social networks: Miami, Daytona Beach, Tampa Bay, Detroit, Toronto and Montreal (with more cities to come). It’s an excellent idea as employers and workers are always looking for new ways to connect, locally.

As you can see, social networks will continue to evolve and amaze those who watch them thrive in all sorts of directions, with more power, more storage and more features than ever before.

For all these reasons and many more, it may seem like social networks have reached a plateau but in reality, they may just be warming up for a highly networked future.

Tags: social networks, social networking, online networks, people, connect, connections, online friends, myspace, facebook, hi5, linkedin, networked, jobs, business, niche networks, members, free

What social networking vendors offer, for businesses…

The social networking scene has taken the web by storm as Blogger, Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace and countless others expand peoples’ reach way beyond their physical community to realms that span across cyberspace.

It so easy.

People create a profile and voilà !

They’re set to share content, ideas and opinions.

Social networking, especially for those who know their way around, is insanely cool. It’s no surprise that so many organizations are looking to setup their own, internally. Once a business social network is up and running, if it’s done right, employees and managers can connect among themselves with ease.

One theory, with regards to business social networks, is that good ideas get validated and bad ideas get discarded more quickly, which leads to faster product development — but it’s just a theory.

In general, companies will benefit, in various ways, from the content that’s being created, shared, added upon and archived for later use.

Any company can make social networking yield benefits but like most new things, it would be foolish to attempt to qualify its financial bottomline usefulness with hard metrics. For the time being, it’s more a matter of getting in early than trying to catch up, later on.

So assuming you’re ready to launch your internal social network, which solution should you choose? Well, that’s for the IT guys to decide but to get the ball rolling, consider the following vendors…

• Drupal
  • Open source.
  • Great at community-driven sites.
  • Blogs and profiles.
• IBM Lotus Connections
  • Paid software.
  • Helps you execute tasks more quickly by using dynamic networks of coworkers, partners and customers
  • Blogs, profiles, social bookmarks, communities and more.
• Jive Software
  • Licensed software or hosted SaaS.
  • Integrates the “enterprise 2.0″ capabilities of collaboration software, community software and social networking software.
  • Wikis, blogs, profiles, social bookmarks, tags, discussions and more.
• MS-SharePoint
  • Paid server software, MS SaaS or hosted by 3rd parties.
  • In its own words: connecting people, process and information.
  • Wikis, blogs, profiles and communities.
• NewsGator
  • Paid software. Extends MS-SharePoint.
  • Empower employees, customers and partners to collaborate, communicate, and innovate in order to create business value through social computing.
  • SharePoint add-ons for tags, tag clouds, expert search, discussions and more.
• Scuttle
  • Open source.
  • Light on the more advanced features but does social bookmarking like it should.
  • Social bookmarking.
• Socialtext
  • Paid hosted service or on-location server appliance.
  • Used for all employees to get a collective view of what’s going on and share content.
  • Wikis, blogs, profiles, social bookmarks and microblogging.
• Telligent
  • Lease the software or buy perpetual licenses.
  • Designed for high-volume communities where performance and up-time are critical.
  • Wikis, blogs, profiles, groups and communities, social analytics and more.

And as you continue searching for vendors, expect to find lots of other worthwhile finds. Keep in mind that the big software firms are currently being swarmed by waves of smaller firms offering solid codesets and eye-pleasing visuals so expect the heated competition to go on, for a while.

In case you were just thinking about this…

Yes, open source has an advantage over most paid and hosted solutions: it’s free!

It’s also instantly available through a simple download and there’s no licensing fee, whatsoever. If you can make up for a little less “business-class support”, open source scripts will likely end up being your first and all-time best choice. Keep in mind open source projects evolve all the time and all those upcoming updates will also be… free. Which is nice.

And don’t forget that open source projects usually come with mountains of useful plug-ins which add bleeding edge features to your core script. Plus the fact you can dive right into your code and tweak just about anything you want. No encryption here.

But perhaps open source is not your thing.

If that’s your case, paid scripts (or software) or hosted solutions is where you’ll most likely end up as very few organizations develop their own social networking engine from scratch.

With such solutions, the deeper your pockets, the more features you’ll get.

And you’re not too picky, customizationwise, you’ll be up and running rather quickly. Software as a service (or “Saas”) is where many mid-sized companies like to do business because everything’s hosted externally. There can be some cost saving at first but as the content volume grows, it can inflate the rent to the point where it’s not that much of a deal anymore so watch out for that. Do your mathematical projections before you sign-up.

Paid software is generally hosted in-house and it’s generally yours for life but remember that the upgrades might cost you a lot of dough, over and above all the other technical maintenance cost. Again, do your mathematical projections before rearranging your server room to accomodate a business social networking software solution.

If you still feel anxious about deploying a social network in your enterprise, seek help from the vendors themselves or from local IT firms which specialize in web 2.0 stuff.

All in all, if your organization is still unsure about wether it’s worth it to have an internal social network, consider that employees will get access to blogs, wikis and tools that let them communicate, collaborate and share information.

The real bottom-line question might be, how much is it worth, to your enterprise, to have its employees using applications it controls and manages? Once that question is answered, everything else aligns itself accordingly.

Tags: social networking, social networks, internal networks, company social network, enterprise, business, social networking vendors, ibm, lotus, jive, sharepoint, saas, hosted solutions, paid software, .net, microsoft, blogs, wikis, search, information, connect, share, content, server

Social networking in business

Networking isn’t new.

Social networking is the online equivalent of a offline meeting where, among other things, geography and schedules wouldn’t matter. Now, that’s a weird concept for some C-level dinosaurs but for the tech-savvy managers moving up, it makes perfect sense.

At the very foundation of networking, there are two things: humans and communications.

In a business setting, a basic goal would be for ideas to be clearly communicated, among all “humans”, in the organization. A more advanced goal would be for those ideas to mature and turn into “value”, one way or another.

Blogs and wikis haven’t replaced email messages and chatting but they’ve definitely added shared spaces where project data (and ideas) can more easily pollinate, more often than not, in ways that were largely unpredictable. Putting the information “out there”, for an entire team (or company) to see is a powerful way to leverage teamwork.

Social networking for businesses see communities of interest spring up around subject matters rather than organizational hierarchies. If you’ve been in business for a while, you’re well aware that the best ideas don’t necessarily come from the “top brass”. Networking at all levels of a company smashes the invisible glass walls which have the bad habit of strangling innovation, big time.

Generally speaking, social applications provide business value by letting people add context to information stores which, in turn, helps others identify what’s useful to them — it also makes search results that much more relevant.

Social bookmarks are a nice example of this since team members can share the web resources they like and learn from others about web destinations that have been overlooked. After a while, the bookmark list becomes a real time saver.

Naturally, enterprise social networking helps people find and connect with co-workers through user profiles, expert search and social graphs that map out any employee’s connections throughout the organization. This, in and of itself, makes for a strong argument for social networking, in the modern workplace.

Finding co-workers with domain-specific knowledge, in just a few clicks, can really propel any organization to a whole new level of communications, productivity, teamwork and of course, profitability.

Some organizations are obsessed with the “dangers of wasting time” wrongly associated with social networking. But that’s very bad management since social networking is a communications enabler and as such, it’s built to help channel information to the right people, wherever the people may be in the organizational chart.

If you’re just starting out in the social networking for business “adventure”, make sure to take a look at the quality open source scripts that are available to structure your data into blogs, forums, wikis or just about any other way you wish.

Tags: social networking, enterprise, business, work, workplace, colleagues, co-workers, employees, team members, managers, c-level, executives, decisions, ideas, communications, information, organization, open source, blogs, wikis

Revenue Pilot’s new features

According to Salomon Smith Barney, the Internet search and related services has been estimated to be around $2.6 billion back in 2004 with an annual growth rate of over 20% through 2008.

We’re almost halfway through 2007 and according to U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray‚Äôs Senior Analyst, Safa Rashtchy, the paid search market has already reached nearly $7 billion in worldwide revenues, growing at a compounded annual rate of 35 percent.

As you can see, as more online advertisers are turning to performance-based online advertising solutions to fulfill their cyber-marketing objectives, pay-per-click search is quickly growing as -the- marketing solution of choice.

Revenue Pilot, based in Brooklyn, NY has earned itself a solid reputation over time, namely because of their respectable array of serious advertisers and on-time payouts to the publishers.

To make their pay-per-click ads even more convenient to display, for the publishers, Revenue Pilot has recently added new linking methods, such as:

• JavaScript Array
• TextFeed
• Dynamic Popouts
• Popouts
• Dynamic Layer Ads
• Floating Ads
• Interstitials
• Error Pages

Getting the codes to technically display Revenue Pilot’s ads through these methods (and others) is really easy but if you’re looking to seamlessly blend RP’s ads in your pages, the most efficient way to do it is through the “XML feeds” since they allow for virtually limitless visual customization.

Some keywords appear to be more lucrative than others. For instance, the “casino“-related paid search results seem to deliver the highest payout, for the publisher. Other competitive keywords inlude “mortgages“, “credit“, “finance“, “gaming“, “insurance“, “security” and “travel“.

In fact, if you deal in any industry where those keywords are applicable, it might be a good thing to sign-up for your very own publisher account where you get a healthy 60% from every “valid” click.

From my experience, dealing with the Business Development people at RP has been a very positive experience and for anyone with the need to monetize their good ideas, it may just be what the “doctor” ordered ; )

Tags: revenue pilot, pay-per-click, online advertising, tech, web