Using Social Media In the Workplace

By James Zipadelli

A survey by Accenture says that everyone needs to learn how to use technology and the knowledge that young adults age 14-27 — millenials — bring to the workplace, because the “old” IT rules need not apply.

In, “Jumping the Boundaries of Corporate IT: Accenture Global Research on Millenials Use of Technology” young adults in the U.S. and Asia-Pacific also have a more positive view of technology, whereas in European nations such as Italy, France and the Netherlands, technology is seen more negatively.

The anonymous survey was done over an 18-month period in 13 countries around the world, excluding Africa and Antarctica, says Gary Curtis, Accenture’s chief technology strategist. Accenture is planning follow-up research over the next 18 months and they hope to have new U.S. data by the end of 2010.

Survey findings

• 77 percent of U.S. young adults say, “Technology helps improve the quality of my work.” 62 percent surveyed in Asia-Pacific feel this way and 32 percent agree in Europe.
• 73 percent surveyed in the U.S. say, “Technology helps make it easier to communicate with my peers and supervisors.” 53 percent agree in Asia-Pacific and 34 percent agree in Europe.
• 30 percent surveyed in the U.S. age 18-27 say, “State-of-the-art equipment and technology will be vital in my employer selection.” 65 percent in India agreed with this question.
• Working adults in China spend the most time — 33 hours per week — on social media Web sites, texting or instant messaging. Their U.S. counterparts spend 19.3 hours per week on those sites.

Curtis, 60, says this research has helped him understand the value of technology and social media. ”For example, I wasn’t an active Facebook user prior to research,” Curtis says. “This has real value, I’m a regular Twitter user, but I have found sources that are very interesting. I fly almost 400,000 real miles per year.”

Curtis hypothesizes that there is a correlation between technology and the work/life balance.

“A lot of new technologies extend business availability into personal life. On my Blackberry, the thing never stops giving messages,” Curtis says. “I get 300-400 per day. The fact that I have a device more or less enables me to deal with it. Those things become part of your personal space, they can rob you of personal life balance. These technologies become an extension of work.”

According to Curtis, he does put his Blackberry away from time to time, but not for long.

“I go places where there is no digital service on vacation. Much of Baja [Calif.] does not have digital service,” Curtis says. “I find it to be refreshing but after a few days I find I’m falling behind in my work. You have to make choices in work and life balance.”

‘Millenials’ speak up about technology and work
Working adults DigitalMediaBuzz.com spoke with say technology is very helpful in the workplace. “I use social media websites every day, all day, for work specifically,” says Stephanie Robinson, an associate at R|F Binder, a public relations firm in New York City. “Once I get home I don’t do as much.”

“A variety of my clients are on twitter and Facebook, and I have had the opportunity to advise them on the launch of their pages,” Robinson, 24, says. “We host social media meetings every Friday and help with Twitter chats once per month. We’re looking to partner with mommy bloggers and are always looking for different ways we can promote our clients’ pages. Facebook has been an amazing platform for consumer interaction for my clients.”

Robinson’s colleague, Tara Maroney, 25, says she finds social media websites useful at work. “I use both Facebook and Twitter for clients, and in the past I have also monitored a LinkedIn page for a client,” Maroney says. “Twitter is valuable because it gives me a quick snapshot of what’s happening in the news.”

“I am an avid New York Times follower, and getting instant updates of what’s happening helps me do my job better,” Maroney continues.  “I also follow a number of reporters and this gives me insight into the types of stories they are working on and what sources they might be looking for. Facebook I find less helpful from a professional standpoint but I do use it to see what’s going on and to monitor if anyone is talking about my clients.”

Kate Farber, the firm’s director of interactive solutions, says it’s beneficial to use social media to reach out to clients. “No matter the age of us or our clients, everyone is very interested in getting involved with social media and we’re here to help them do that,” Farber, 27, says. “A lot of the Millenials in my company read blogs and Twitter to keep up to date on their areas of expertise. They’re pitching journalists via Twitter, connected with them on LinkedIn, reaching out to bloggers, etc. Social media has really become an integrated part of the PR business.”

According to Farber, personal and professional lives become blurred with technology, so she advises employees of any age to use good judgment while online.

“Some of the ‘best practices’ we recommend to our employees and clients alike are to practice full disclosure when engaging in social media - make sure whoever is reading your comments know your connection to the company or brand,” Farber says. “Also, taking the time to listen to what others are saying online is crucial to successfully engaging them. And don’t forget, when you write something online it could theoretically live there forever - clients, employers, the media - basically anyone could read it.”

Robinson says she limits the amount of personal information she posts on Twitter and Facebook. “Even though I have some of my friends on Twitter, and it’s my personal page, I would never write anything inappropriate because I’m still representing the company and still representing the client,” Robinson says. “I will Tweet interesting stories from food blogs or other online sites, which is helpful for my clients and for me. I do accept friend requests (on Facebook) of some of my colleagues, but I don’t go out of my way to friend them considering I still have pictures from high school and college on there.”

Spinning Tweets of Gold: Twitter’s Revenue Model

By John Greaves

Twitter, the social networking giant that has revolutionized the way we interact with each other and search for information, seems to be planning to monetize using third-party applications. On the other hand, it might be planning to charge companies for access to its site’s products. Or maybe it will just sell ad space. It’s still not clear despite Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s promise that we would know how his company plans to start making money in early 2010.

The question of Twitter’s move toward monetization has been a topic of discussion for years, and of course, Twitter has a history of promoting third-party apps without being paid for them. So intense is interest in how Twitter will monetize that a hoax last year concerning paying for premium accounts led to a firestorm of outrage that increased when protesters learned they were the victims of a prank by BBspot.

This is partly because Twitter’s investors have long maintained that they were in no hurry to make money off the micro-blogging site. Stone told reporters in 2009 the company wasn’t fretting about the need to monetize. “There are no dates when we need to break even. We have plenty of money in the bank,” he says.

The question remains, what is Twitter planning and will it be successful? In 2007 Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter and the current CEO, let slip some of the ways he thought the site could generate income. “Two more-straightforward ideas: 1) Ads on the site. We have a little AdSense on there now, but we haven’t really tried. As the traffic grows, some tasteful sponsorships might be sellable. 2) Charging companies who are using it for marketing or other commercial purposes. If an organization finds Twitter to be a valuable communication tool with their customers/constituents/etc — especially if we’re sending lots of SMS’s for them, which cost us money — it seems viable to make an offering around that,” he said.

Steve Hofstetter, a comedian who has helped create apps for Facebook and the iPhone as part of promoting his brand, is enthusiastic about Twitter monetizing through ad revenue.  “Click on their website right now, you know they have that little useless twitter definition, who gets utility out of that? People in the office enjoy that, if you made that a tiny little ad; it doesn’t just give utility to Twitter, marketers put ads on sites because they’re good for the consumer, I’ve found good stuff through banner ads,” Hofstetter says.

Nevertheless, according to Radar Research founder Marissa Gluck there is a problem with simply relying on advertising to monetize social media. “In terms of advertising, click-through rates and engagement historically tend to be very low on social networks, consumers aren’t really there to search out products or to purchase, they’re not in that mode, they’re not in that mentality, so consumers are not really engaging with ads on social networks because they want to engage with their friends,” Gluck says.

On the other hand, Gluck points to the fact that Twitter wears many hats in the social media arena and can perhaps choose multiple revenue streams to be successful including the second option Williams mentioned. “Twitter is everything from a social network to an RSS feed to a broadcasting platform, so Twitter is a little bit different, which is why for Twitter it makes more sense to look towards paid subscriptions from commercial enterprises as well as advertising,” Gluck says.

Ian Swanson, the CEO of Sometrics, a company that helps developers and brands monetize the social Web, thinks Twitter is right to avoid the ad model for now. “If you look at the expertise of the company, you’ve got to say is this a media company, is this a company that belongs on Madison Avenue or is this a tech company? They really know their strengths. Hey we’re really good at building this platform, really good at the technology - so let’s allow the brands and third-party applications to build on top of our platform and if we go through and charge people for that access, almost like taxing the system, eventually they’re going to make money and that’s just a smart approach for them.”

This echoes comments made by Stone to the Reuters Global Technology Summit in May 2009. “”There are no people at Twitter who know anything about advertising or work in advertising. So we don’t have anyone there to make or take those calls,” Stone says.

It is obvious that third-party applications have figured out how to monetize using Twitter. A PR Newswire press release notes that TwitterJobSearch, the first real-time job search engine, has evolved its offering to include an In-Stream Ads service. Back in 2007, Steve Poland even blogged on easy ways to make money with Twitter using third-party applications. Ad.ly “enables Twitter publishers to make money from the content they produce on Twitter by sending one tweet every day from advertisers that they approve.”

The question is not whether it’s possible for Twitter to monetize itself. Rather everyone is wondering whether 2010 will be the year when Twitter begins to spin tweets into gold.

Content Factories Crowd Online Ecosystem

By Sheila Shayon

The proliferation of crowdsourced publishing platforms on the Web is being heralded as the next generation of a content publishing/syndication platform. There’s room for both amateur experts and professionals, and it’s a burgeoning marketplace for content distribution discoverable through search and attractive to advertisers. One thing for sure, the ecosystem of Web content is evolving dramatically right under our fingers.

The content contributors are compensated with varying models of up-front payment and ad revenue. The analytics and metrics to measure the value of the content against ad dollars are more robust than ever, and in turn, the targeted, niche audiences are of increasing if elusive value to advertisers.

All that said — critics are labeling these companies content mills. Prevailing wisdom questions whether five to fifteen dollars for a well-researched, well-written article, with references and illustrations, is even remotely fair. Is the majority of content indeed that well-written and researched?

The brands in the space see themselves as complementing traditional media by offering more depth and granularity. Critics see them storing up content on the back of cheap labor to partner with media companies, attract advertisers, and leverage publishers with an arsenal of thousands of contributors and millions of pieces of content - for profit.

DMB spoke with three of the brands — arguably the largest, AOL, the oldest, Associated Content, and the one most focused on a meritocratic model, Helium.

Seed.com
SEED.com is AOL’s premium, low-cost content management system which assigns, buys and distributes work for its 80 Web properties.

AOL’s newly launched site, Owl.com, is described as “a living, breathing library where useful knowledge, opinions and images are posted from experts the world over.” Owl crowdsources freelance work submitted on movies, books, health, sports, money, parenting, computers and more.

An “expert” is anyone who gets approved through SEED. The articles are mostly how-to advice, and contributor’s fees are low: Fighting Travel Fatigue: 10 Ways to Battle Jet Lag and Finding the Perfect Red Lipstick, for example.

Add to the mix, StudioNow, acquired in January, and AOL is poised to integrate a fully functional video creation platform into SEED, and launch a national network. “Our core focus is the consumer. At the end of each day, the question is have we offered the most relevant and useful recipe of news and entertainment to the consumer,” says Bill Wilson, president, AOL Media, for the last nine years. “We finally have a marriage of art and analytics, the technology platform and the expertise.”

“Producers” are paid anywhere from $20 per article to $100-plus. “We’re hiring passionate writers, drawn by the immediacy of Web publishing and the feedback loop from consumers. There’s a new level of participation on offer,” Wilson says.

Jeff Levick, AOL’s president, Global Advertising and Strategy, “Our strategy with advertisers is to be co-creators. We know the areas of content ahead of time, and we want to work with our advertisers to maximize high engagement. Search is provable and transparent, but display is evolving. We can’t wedge display into search ROI.”

AOL recently announced that David Eun will join the company as president of AOL Media and Studios, replacing Wilson, effective March 1.

Wilson summed up what his team has built: “Supply is not an issue, it’s demand that’s growing. But fragmentation is our friend. Brands do matter, and ours let the consumer quickly cut through the clutter. We’re focused on original, high-quality, scalable content.”

Levick adds, “The pace of adoption is so much faster today, and marketers need to learn how to keep pace with the changes of the consumer.”

AssociatedContent.com
AssociatedContent.com, (AC), based in Denver, Colo., is one of the fastest-growing sites on the Web with an audience of 8.2 million unique monthly visitors. It’s also been around longer than most - five years. AC describes itself as ‘The People’s Media Company,’ and accepts articles from amateurs and professionals.

“We consider ourselves the most democratic, open publishing platform in the Web content ecosystem,” says Patrick Keane, CEO. “We have 300,000 individual contributors, 60,000 topics, and process 3,000 pieces of content a day.”  Its elixir - content curation, keyword taxonomy and user rewards, has successfully grown its Web traffic. “We offer great elasticity to the content, we don’t want to govern interests or passions - just be an effective and efficient content engine.”

AC offers upfront payments for certain articles, ranging from $1 to $20, and contributors receive monthly payments based on page views. AC supports contributors by driving Internet users through search to the right content, and then further monetizing it through targeted ads.

“The incredible scale we have achieved has validated the model of an open and data-driven content platform,” Keane says. Asked about the appellation - content mill, he replied, “I’d rather be called a content factory - achieving efficiency and scale. Content mill is a 19th century term leftover from the dead tree crowd.”

Serving up content to advertisers remains the driving engine behind all crowdsourced sites. “We chose to invest in content that works for advertisers rather than a subscription or pay wall model,” Keane continues. “Advertising is a much higher margin business, and we’re working on the creative challenges of display. That said, search is the oxygen of the Web, and the arbiter of content success.”

Helium.com
Helium.com, launched in October 2006, and claims to be the world’s largest community of writers having published more than 1.5 million articles on 170,000 unique topics. Monthly visitors include more than 4.5 million people, and content topics range from careers to home and garden, parenting, politics and more.

According to president and CEO, Mark Ranalli, “Our roots are different from all the others in that our value proposition is human intelligence. We pull value out of the Web network platform and are appreciators of the capability of the endpoint - people.”

In addition to usual contributor tasks, Helium writers earn money by securing writing assignments with publishers through Helium’s freelance Marketplace, competing in writing contests and engaging in debate around issues and causes important to them. “Ours is a meritocracy model, we have over 150,000 writers, and 10,000 of those most capable get filtered up to the top as unique experts,” Ranalli says. “We’re like a co-op for the writing community. We’re more interested in quality than scale.”

The company recently announced that publishers such as Rand Publishing and Hearst Corporation are leveraging Helium.com to select writers for newspaper community stringers and even nonfiction book titles. If Helium  licenses content to other publishers, the contributor gets a cut of the sale, and revenues are shared based on traffic, article quality and advertiser interest.

Article payments range from 50 cents to $2.50 per article. A dollar is earned if you write an article on an empty title — empty titles are articles Helium wants based on visitor feedback. “There are 220 million websites out there today, with more content than anybody can consume. Readership is not the problem, economics is.”

The only consensus in this third act of the Internet is that traditional media is under severe pressure to reinvent itself in a Web culture that offers every user virtually unlimited content, broad access and immediacy, transparent search, niche-ization granularity and brand agnostic content — for free, for now. And that the right tools to maximize ad dollars are not yet firmly in place. “Story is now commodity,” AC’s Keane says.

The old days of terrestrial content, credentialed journalism and omnipotent editors has been replaced by algorithmic criteria such as keywords and seasonality, and a burgeoning, hungry class of amateur experts.

2010 API Developers’ Conferences Round-Up

By Ron Callari

This year API developers’ conferences are flourishing as Web and Mobile Platforms are expanding the playing field. From well-attended repeat events like MacWorld and Apple’s WWDC to first-time events like Twitter’s Chirp event, official conferences for third-party developers will cover mobile devices, OAuth, geolocation, enterprise applications and much more.

In layman’s terms, to understand Application Program Interfaces (API) in its simplest form - it’s analogous to relying on others to perform functions that you may not be able or permitted to do by yourself, such as opening a bank safety deposit box. Similarly, virtually all software has to request other software to perform some functions to extend its usage potential.

The practice of publishing APIs has allowed web communities to create an open architecture for sharing of content and data between communities and applications. In this way, content that is created in one place can be dynamically posted and/or updated in multiple locations on the Web.

This year’s round-up of developers’ conferences is listed here chronologically.

360|iDev
April 11-14
San Jose Convention Center
San Jose, Calif.

360|iDev started in San Jose, March of 2009, and will be back in April of 2010. The Silicon Valley is exploding with iPhone development companies and iPhone related startups. After the initial success of their first 360|iDev, 360|iDev San Jose plans to build and expand on that momentum this year. The intent of the conference is to bring the best and brightest minds in the development community together for 3 days of intensive sessions, social interaction, best practices and innovative new ideas.

TWITTER Chirp
April 14-15
Palace of Fine Arts Theatre
Herbst Pavilion, Fort Mason Center
San Francisco, Calif.

Twitter’s first official conference for developers, Chirp was just scheduled for April 14-15 and will cost developers $469. It’s a two-day event with a conference covering OAuth, geolocation and streaming, among other topics, and then a 24-hour hack day for first-time developers to work with seasoned pros. There are only 800 seats available, so developers who have not signed up yet, are encouraged to do so at the earliest.

FACEBOOK f8 2010
April 21-22
San Francisco, Calif.

According to their fan page, on May 24, 2007, Facebook launched their Facebook Platform alongside 800 developers and entrepreneurs at their first f8 conference in San Francisco. Many developers built the innovative applications which paved the way for future development. Today, there are over 500,000 applications on Facebook.com, and over 300 of those have more than one million users each.

This year will be Facebook’s third f8, to be held in San Francisco on April 21-22, 2010.

Become a fan of their f8 Page on Facebook to get updates and information (including how to register) as they make these announcements. Check out the videos and photos from prior f8 conferences and developers can also share their stories and experiences from the past.

GOOGLE I/O
May 19-20
Moscone West
San Francisco, Calif.

Google I/O brings together thousands of developers for two days of deep technical content, focused on building the next generation of web, mobile, and enterprise applications with Google and open web technologies such as Android, Google Chrome, Google APIs, Google Web Toolkit, App Engine, and more.

I/O will feature over 80 sessions ranging from introductory talks to deep dives on the nuts and bolts of a particular technology or product. Fireside chats will also return this year, where you can ask questions to Google engineers in an informal, intimate setting.

The Developer Sandbox, first introduced at I/O 2009, returns this year. The Sandbox will feature over 100 developers who have built applications based on technologies and products featured at I/O. These developers will be on hand to demo their apps, talk about how they built them, answer questions, and exchange ideas.

WEBAPPS ‘10
USENIX Conference on Web Application Development
June 23-25
Boston, Mass.

Since 1975, the USENIX Association has brought together a community of engineers, system administrators, scientists, and technicians working on the cutting edge of the computing world.

Join them for the first USENIX Conference on Web Application Development. WebApps ‘10 is a new technical conference designed to bring together experts in all aspects of developing and deploying Web applications. Web-based applications are revolutionizing both the features that can be delivered and the technologies for developing and deploying applications.  The full program will be available at their Web site some time in March 2010. Check out their Web site for announcement details.

APPLE
World Wide Developers Conference 2010
Moscone Center, San Francisco
June 28-July 2

According to a Wikipedia listing, the WWDC 2010 venue is unknown at the present time, but the conference will, in most likelihood, be held in California as an Apple “corporate event” has been scheduled at the normal WWDC venue, the Moscone Center, for June 28 through July 2.  Information on last year’s event can be found at their 2009 event website.

MICROSOFT
Microsoft Professional Developers Conference
(No venue or date scheduled at the time of this posting)

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (or PDC) is a conference for Windows developers.

It covers new and upcoming technology from Microsoft, and so only occurs in the years when there is something new to talk about. The conference is typically hosted by the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, Calif.

The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is Microsoft’s premier gathering of leading-edge developers and architects. Attendees come from around the world to learn about the future of Microsoft’s developer platform, exchange ideas with Microsoft technology experts, and network with fellow professionals. This is the conference you need to attend if you want to stay ahead of the curve, and get a head start on planning your company’s products and technology investments.

Microsoft’s PR department has indicated that interested parties can learn more about the future conference dates, industry-leading speakers and registration info by visiting their website.

BLACKBERRY Developer Conference
September 27-30
Marriott Marquis
San Francisco, Calif.

Stay up-to-date on what’s coming up at the 2010 BlackBerry Developer Conference. The conference is a dedicated forum for the developer community to immerse itself in all aspect of creating consumer and business applications for the BlackBerry platform.

What you’ll take home is some of the following:

• The inside scoop on developing for the BlackBerry platform and the very latest in software, hardware and tools from RIM and its partners
• Invaluable information directly from RIM experts who will personally share their expertise
• First-hand experiences from developers who have successfully created, integrated and managed wireless applications
• Best practices from industry leaders to shortcut development cycles and drive new applications to market

For readers who have been involved with any of these conferences, feel free to provide us with your feedback. And if there are any Developer Conferences not listed here that you feel are significant, please comment on that as well.

Twitter Goes Local

By: websitemagazine.com

Twitter has added a new trending topic functionality, this time with a local tilt. On the right side of your Twitter home page, you will see a notification of trending topics that you can change (at right).

[Read More and Discuss]

Postling

Businesses that have adopted social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr  and blogs as a way to market, listen and respond to their customers have found that logging into different sites every date to post updates can be a major time suck.  This is particularly true for agencies and other marketers who post on behalf of multiple clients or companies with multiple brands. Postling offers a software-as-a-service solution that can streamline this process. In three simple steps you can publish your blog post, update your Twitter and Facebook status with a link announcing the post and upload any photos in the post to Flickr. Postling supports Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, Squarespace, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Adding an account is a breeze.

Features:

• Simplify publishing workflow
• Organize your social media accounts
• Comment aggregation
• Collaborate with team and clients

Take a tour and see all of Postling’s features.

Next Page »