Actually, you could even call it a “social teaching” site. Busuu.com (website) taps into an international community of language-learning enthusiasts — of English, Spanish, French, and German for now at least — and incorporates easy-to-use language learning methods much like its offline software brethren such as Rosetta Stone. But it doesn’t stop there. Busuu sets its users up to connect with and correct each other via “editing” of other users’ written responses in the form of comments and ratings (pictured below) and live chat. You basically have a network of a several personal language tutors at your fingertips, 24 hours and 7 days a week.

It works because it takes advantage of the fact that every person is already an expert in at least one language — their own — and when armed with an eagerness to learn new languages, this makes for a dedicated community of users who are more than willing to share their own expertise in exchange for the expertise of others. Combined with its interactive lessons, pick-your-own topics, news feed of when others have “edited” or commented on your writing exercises, and even little animated trees that grow as you grow your language skills, Busuu is well on its way to fulfilling the dreams of its co-founders in maintaining the diversity of languages around the world.

The inspiration for the website’s name “Busuu”? A language from Cameroon that is only spoken by eight people in the world.

“Working a Room” Through Social Media

Social Media personality, Gary Vaynerchuk, created an excellent video about “giving a presentation versus working a room”.

My summary of the premise:
Old school brands that only use display ads are limiting themselves. Traditional advertising allows only one direction – from the advertiser to the consumer. It’s analogous to giving a presentation and then not allowing for questions, getting in your car and leaving. There is no opportunity for feedback. There is little recognition if your audience understood what you were talking about, and no ability to learn from the audience to further craft your message for the future.

Social media, however, encourages interaction. By leveraging multiple tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many more, you can converse with your audience. It’s analogous to working a room. You can have intimate conversations with constituents, learn from them, and address questions. The point is to be available and engage.

Lastly, social media is inexpensive. Many of these tools are free, and it only requires passionate people to interact with the constituents.

But Don’t Act too Quickly!
While Gary discussed the concept of working a room, it is critical to not act too quickly. New messages often need to be absorbed. People may be confused at first, and that may be OK.

For instance: The first time I saw the Budweiser frogs commercial, I laughed, but was confused. Why are frogs in a swamp, hardly an appetizing thought, saying “bud” “weis” “er”? If I had access to social media in 1995, I may have commented about their poor choice of spokesmen. Many others may have commented as well – and if Budweiser reacted, they would have not created one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history.

How do brands achieve success?

• Join the communities and understand how they work. Each one is unique and each has its own utility.
• Develop a strategy on how to leverage the online world and how you will address your constituents
• Integrate your offline marketing with online efforts and track results
• Strive to achieve balance between experimenting and staying the course
• Lastly, start NOW. Your competitors are.

Dearest Marketers,

BusinessWeek is now talking about it. So is The New York Times. Mainstream companies are jumping on board, including recent entry Dunkin’ Donuts. And a bunch of CEOs are too. But please, my friends: Don’t ruin Twitter.

If I had to sum up the most important thing to know about marketing via Twitter (or via any social media tool, actually), it would be this: Market with your customers, not at them. Twitter is not a channel for pushing marketing messages. It is a platform for forming relationships. It’s not one-way, and it’s not even two-way. It’s where multi-way conversations happen and, if you do it right, where authentic conversation (not marketing speak) can lead to awareness, engagement, and loyalty.

For Molecular’s take on how you can use Twitter effectively, check out our article on iMediaConnection. For a list of useful Twitter-related tools, also click to this comprehensive list.

Something like 95% of all email is spam. When so many voices are yelling at customers, they simply stop listening. Let’s not do that to social media tools too.

It’s exciting to see how much information is readily available on the Internet, especially on a topic like social media.  I am delighted to have the opportunity to analyze and synthesize data from so many sources. However, as often happens when data are simplified for presentation to the public, some of the numbers are presented without enough context, which makes it difficult to interpret them. As I compared across web sites, I started to notice places where the numbers didn’t line up. This reflects the fact that usage and trends in the digital world change constantly, while research reports stay online, trapped in the moment when they were most recently uploaded. Social media usage world-wide is growing rapidly. So numbers from March of this year are significantly lower than numbers from September of this year. I have encountered sites reporting that MySpace has more members than any other social networking site, and sites reporting that Facebook has this honor. This is because Facebook’s growth skyrocketed, and they passed MySpace globally in April of this year (MySpace still has more members in the US).

Another issue is that differences in methodology can lead to different results. In academia, research reports generally include detailed accounts of their methodology, the sample they use, the wording of the questions asked. This is great for hard core researchers who want to know every detail of how the data were gathered (and use those details to gain a better understanding of what the data really mean), but is unlikely to hold the interest of the average blog-surfer. So write-ups for the digital audience tend to be more concise, and generally skim over much, if not all, of the specific information about methodology (sample, data collection, etc).

Yesterday I read Universal McCann’s Wave.3 report on social media, which asserts that 58% of Internet users globally have created a profile on a social network. So I decided I should check some of the Social Media posts on our own Molecular Voices. I quickly found Yuval Zukerman’s recent post on lack of awareness of social networks. He cites a well-designed study by Molecular’s sister company Synovate, which reports that 58% of global users don’t know what a social network is.

What’s going on here? These are both large-scale studies (Universal McCann surveyed 17,000 users world-wide; Synovate surveyed 13,000), from well-respected companies with a history of doing quality research. So how do we get to a situation in which 58% of users have created profiles on social networks, while only 42% even know what social networks are?

I can think of two reasons off the top of my head why this might be so.

1) They may be defining “user” differently: Wave.3 explicitly states that they surveyed only people who use the Internet every day or every other day. Neither Yuval’s report, nor the summary posted by Synovate articulate who their “users” are. If Synovate is using less stringent criteria (e.g., they count as users anyone who’s logged on in the past month, or anyone who has an email address), they’re looking at a larger population than Universal McCann.  Synovate’s entire population could be so much larger than Universal McCann’s that 42% of the Synovate population includes more people than 58% of Universal McCann’s population.

2) Language about online phenomena is ephemeral, and not universally adopted. Many people who use networking sites may not know they are using “social media,” not unlike M. Jourdain in Moliere’s The Bourgeoise Gentilhomme, who is surprised to learn at age 70 that he has been speaking prose all his life. Neither report gives full wording of the question, but it’s possible that the wave.3 report’s question was along the lines of “Have you ever created a profile on a social networking site, such as Facebook or MySpace?” while Synovate’s respondents were merely asked “Are you familiar with social networking sites?”

This problem becomes more intense as you begin to look at third party reporting of research (such as blog posts or e-news articles describing someone else’s work). Last week a large number of news and blogging sites discussed Bill Tancer’s new book, Click, largely focusing on one finding: social networking sites have surpassed porn sites in popularity. This is an intriguing finding, but I can’t find in any of the articles the specifics about how popularity was measured. Did Tancer compare the number of unique visitors to each site? The amount of time each visitor spends on the site? The number of links to each site? Without this information, it is difficult to tell what the statistics mean. Many of the articles talk in detail about search, suggesting that more people are searching for social media sites than for pornography. None of the articles indicate whether the data is from click streams or self-report. If it’s self-reported, I have difficulty accepting it: people are more apt to report engaging socially acceptable behaviors. I could probably find the answers to these questions in Tancer’s book. However, I suspect that far more people will encounter this information on line than will read Click.

Thanks to the Internet, we have access to more numbers, graphs, and trends than ever before. The proliferation of information available to all of us now requires that we be thoughtful consumers of such information. Numbers take on different meanings in different contexts. In situations where we can’t learn the context, we should take care in interpreting the data. And in situations where we can take the time to provide context, we should do so. This enables us to develop a richer, more complex understanding of the phenomena the data represent.

Recently, I conducted a web search for online digital marketing strategy communities.  I had a vision for what I was looking for, a free-form online outpost where marketing professionals could converge to discuss topics of their choosing.  Things like marketing ROI, digital strategy, performance measurement, search optimization, hiring and firing agencies, lead generation, you name it.  Disappointed in my initial search, I fired off a LinkedIN question and got a number of recommendations.  Next, I checked out the recommendations.  Here, I include a brief summary of each of the communities to help you decide which ones might be appropriate to you:

iMedia Connection:  a number of people recommended this site as a source of information on various aspects of digital marketing.  Industry experts write and submit articles that community members can then comment on.  I’ve written a couple of pieces for the community, which got me an automatic free pass.  Authors are automatically members once they publish, so after some scrambling around I found that I was already a member of this community.  Members can also invite other people (just let me know in comments below and I’ll send you an invite).  Members can also create a public profile page.

LinkedIN Groups: there are thousands of groups on LinkedIN on a wide range of topics, a reflection of the millions of users.  Joining many of them is a simple matter of sending a request to join to the moderator who decides whether to include you.  One of the challenges with the LinkedIN groups is that there are almost too many to choose from.  Searching across all group types with the term Marketing, for instance, yields 3,665 groups (at last count).  Once you are approved, you can view discussion topics in reverse chronological order.  The quality of the topics and the activity on the comments depends entirely on the group and its participants.  The hottest groups have over 10,000 members.  A few of them have a membership requirement that is external to LinkedIN, but the vast majorities are open to any LinkedIN member and are easy to join.

Facebook Groups: like LinkedIN, Facebook boasts hundreds and thousands of professional groups (and even more millions of users).  Groups that are open to the public can be joined in one click.  Also like LinkedIN, the topics aren’t really topics per se; they’re posts that people can comment on.  The result is a flat, rolling stream of reverse-chronological posts that drift from one subject to the next.  If you’re willing to spend some time parsing through random noise you can find some gems, including people with similar professional interests to connect with.  Unfortunately, many of the more popular groups can become victims of their own success and get overrun by spammers – a bigger problem on Facebook than on LinkedIN.  There seems to be less spam in LinkedIN groups than on Facebook groups, perhaps a reflection of the desire for LinkedIN users to manage their professional reputation.

MarketingProfs: this marketing knowledge service has good reach (they claim 324,000 members).  While some of their premium content requires a subscription, their Marketing Know-How Exchange is available to “freemium” registrants.  The exchange is organized into high-level marketing topics, the questions are well-moderated, and the people asking the questions can elect to accept or reject responses.  An interesting points system helps to automatically control and moderate the discussions.  You earn 5 points per day starting from the first day you post a question or an answer, and you are awarded points for answering questions.  You attract respondents by awarding points for answers to your question.  So the redemption value is tied to the speed, rigor and volume of answers you desire.  The system helps bond participants and participation to ensure that they are serious and committed, something totally lacking from Facebook groups.

Forrester Research Discussion Board:  Forrester has jumped into the community space with its own community for Interactive Marketing professionals.  The community is in its alpha version with only a few participants at the time of this post.  It’s open to anyone with a Forrester user ID and password.  If you are not a client, you can still register for free.  It’s just starting out so activity is limited.  It will be interesting to see how it grows.  Right now, it still shows the global navigation for the main Forrester site – which is a little confusing and a constant reminder that the community is, after all, a Forrester property.  Also, it is not yet included in the site global navigation.  Right now there is only one main discussion board, but hopefully it will grow and there will be separate discussion boards on different subjects organized by the moderator.  Forrester’s industry reach is promising for the community, should the company elect to back it in a significant way.

ThinkBalm: Transitioning from Forrester, the final community I’ll mention is the ThinkBalm Innovation Community, which by the way, was started by a former Forrester analyst.  The community is implemented on Spigit [insert link http://www.spigit.com/index.html].  ThinkBalm provides project workspaces that various people can contribute to.  It also has a type of community currency or fiat that is similar to the points system used in MarketingProfs and other communities that acknowledge “power members,” but it is far more elaborate.  Thinkbalm includes a points system where people can earn points by getting positive feedback on their ideas (thumbs-ups or “spigs”), or conversely, lose points when people “scrap” them.  The points are more than fiat.  You can actually redeem them for goodies (an interesting real-world virtual world tie-in).  Speaking of virtual worlds, that’s the focus of ThinkBalm. Although it’s not a pure interactive marketing community per se, I include it here because there are marketing aspects of virtual worlds and also, to point out a more robust community solution for creating new work collaboratively across organization boundaries.  Something I believe the interactive marketing community should do more of.

The community choices you make depend on your objectives: quick answers to thorny questions, showcasing your knowledge and expertise, networking, or just keeping up with trends.  My dream community would combine the participation of a Facebook group, participant bonding like MarketingProfs, a workspace innovation area like ThinkBalm and professional moderation like Forrester, oh, and having profiles like in LinkedIN and the ability to interconnect would be great too.  Mash-up anyone?

A big thank you to all those who answered my LinkedIN question and got me off to the races.  What a great use of a community!  Feel free to chime in below with your thoughts, comments, or favorite communities.

The Presidential debate frenzy is upon us.  Remember the days when you just watched  it on TV and made comments to your friends and family in the living room?  Thanks to the age of connectivity viewers also have the ability to make their opinions known in a public venue while the debate is taking place. This can be to the delight of pollsters who may watch over the formal and informal feedback arenas, but complete transparency into the audience as a whole has yet to be created.  It looked like there were two areas in which the “opaqueness” happens -  geography and technology.

I was watching the debate on the East Coast on a local channel.  Towards the end, a question would flash on the screen asking  “Which candidate do you think has won the debate?” and prompt the viewer to log on to www.thebostonchannel.com to vote.  When I logged in and voted, I noted that the opinions were quite close, with Obama at 39%, McCain at 38%  and 3% were undecided.   The total numbers of voters were not large – under 2,000 – leading me to understand that the polling was strictly local.  I had expected to see more information on a national level, since the whole country was watching at the same time.  What was happening in New Hampshire?  Ohio?  Colorado?   The next day I talked to a colleague at work about the debate and he had also watched it but was commenting and connected to it via Twitter, the micro blogging tool.  His view of opinions from others was not limited to geography, but by technology.  “Twitterers” are people who , by enlarge, take an early adopter role in  technology use and subscribe to a micro blogging service -  software has yet to be taken up by mainstream America. 

It occurred to me that the debate forum would do well to try and create a feedback loop that was wider in scope and more accessible.  Content differences aside of the programming, why couldn’t the debates include the American Idol format of voting by text messages?  Cell phone use is widespread and American Idol’s popularity indicates that the model of texting as voting is familiar to many TV viewers.   Local TV stations would need to join forces with a central polling service which would parse the messages geographically and integrate them with the texted votes.  Then viewers could see the tally as a whole and by region and device (if they wanted to go that far).  This kind of information transparency would increase knowledge about the voter population, engage a wider audience and further involvement and interest with the debates.  With the long tail theory of internet use,  pollsters might even find out how many Ron Paul supporters are still out there…

MySpace might have a bigger audience for the moment, but Facebook is certainly on a rapid growth trajectory, and it is currently the media darling of social networks.  One of the reasons for Facebook’s growing popularity is the ability to create applications which users share virally.  This particularly alluring feature provides companies with a unique opportunity to provide innovative and fun brand experiences that reach a large audience through trusted channels.  While a successful Facebook campaign is an exciting prospect, a misguided foray into social media marketing can leave a high profile and expensive blemish on the brand image, both with consumers as well as in the media. To succeed, it is crucial that brand managers consider a number of challenges, including technical constraints, usability hurdles, and the difficulties of creating a widget which lends itself  to viral replication.  This article will cover some of the critical challenges and constraints of developing a solid Facebook application, as well as review current Facebook applicationss to explore the success or failure of certain features and campaigns.

Keep it simple and fun

Facebook applications are, by and large, fun and fluffy mechanisms by which users communicate with their friends.  In order to remain fun and fluffy, and to promote adoption, applications must be intuitive or easy to pick up.  Simplicity is key, because as the head of user support at Facebook mentioned to me in an interview, “users don’t like to read.”  This should not shock anyone, after all, no user really does read, however, there are other facets to consider when developing an app for a social network.  Simplicity is crucial because it leads to adoption and viral spread.

Roshambull is a game put out by Red Bull which allows users to play rocks paper scissors with one another.  It’s a game that everyone knows, it’s simple, and it’s fun to play with other people.  The no-brainer aspect of this definitely helps viral spread, as, unlike other games, you don’t have to ponder your move.  Another example of this simplicity is Zombies.  Bite your friends and they too, turn into zombies.  Both games are extremely popular, and this is due in no small part to the fact that they are quick to pick up, and make it easy and fun to engage friends.

Make it viral, but don’t be sleazy

Facebook is pretty much built to be a conduit to inform friends of what is going on.  User actions show up in all their friends’ newsfeeds.  Mechanisms to promote viral propagation are built into the Facebook Toolkit.  The list goes on and on, but it’s important to remember not to abuse the power that this website gives you.  First of all, users are sensitive about what they send to their friends; nobody wants to be a spammer.  This is especially applicable on facebook, where a typical user has 300 contacts, and very few of them are good friends.   Secondly, privacy is a concern to users.  If an application leverages a viral tool without the user’s express consent and explicit understanding, it will be very poorly received. If the user does not understand what is happening, they will worry that their account has been compromised.  If the user realizes that the application is sending info without their permission, it won’t last long.  Most users have a small number of applications, certainly under 10, and there are always new ones coming along to compete.  So make the application viral, and help it spread within users social networks, but don’t over do it.

Design within the constraints of the Facebook Application

The applications that run within facebook are constrained by what the website will and will not allow. It is critical that the experience design team understands what is and is not possible within the limits imposed.  For example, a users’ profile page will not allow flash animations. As such, any flash based application should not be designed to run from there, even if it would be a great entry point. Also, the table structure on certain pages is very solidly defined, and cannot be changed.  This will greatly impact the page design.  Finally, certain processes, such as application installation, are run by the facebook app itself, and cannot be changed.  It’s important that the team is familiar with these limitations, and the technical underpinnings of the site.

Match the facebook toolkit

Any application, web or otherwise, is more usable if it’s consistent.  For example, users are more likely to click buttons when they are following a consistent visual treatment, and similar page layouts help task completion.  Facebook is no exception to this rule;  users expect that the applications running on the platform will behave in the same way. Ensure that the page layout is reminiscent of other facebook pages, such as the profile or homepage.  Check that buttons and page elements don’t contradict the larger facebook look and feel.   While this might seem like common sense, if can be very challenging to ensure that there is not too much of a variance as the application evolves. Periodic check ins, or frequent ad hoc user testing are great ways to ensure that the application remains usable and consistent with the facebook application.

As social networks become more and more entrenched in our culture, the number of users on these platforms will grow.  Facebook is a major player, and predicted by many to retain it’s predominance for years to come.  As such, brand managers will do well to explore the possibility of creating an application for the platform, but they must be mindful of challenges around experience design, technical constraints, and viral behaviors.  

Of course you do not want to believe it. You do not want to care about the people who still use dial-up, Windows 98 and AOL. And apparently mom and pop do not tweet much, really.

According to a study by pallbearer and highly vaunted Molecular sister company Synovate , 58% of online users worldwide (and they did talk to a totally not so shabby sample of 13,000 folks) do not even know what social networks are. They should be punished, I agree.

In America, the unaware group is a sigh-of-relief-small 30% but the more shocking aspect is that users are losing the passion and faith: almost half of all socially networked Americans, Canadians, Japanese and Poles say that they are losing interest. I bet they never played Scrabulous.

Other interesting findings:

• Social networks are a global phenomenon – more than a quarter of respondents belong to one. Holland is the most socially crazed.
• People are not monogamous to their social network and often use more than one.
• Americans are especially worried about the dangers of social networks with lack of security and privacy
• Half of users notice ads (probably non-Firefox users) on social networks – with US users leading the pack at 66%
• 40% of respondents felt online interactions are as meaningful as those done face-to-face, and social network users strongly felt that online contacts are better than no contact at all
• Finally, more than half of respondents felt the demise of language skills was due in part to social networks; silly, lol, omg :-D

Gotta love a good survey.

The internet gives us an amazing ability to quickly and effectively influence people, friends and businesses. From blogs to message boards and from Yelp to Facebook, the power of user-driven, or “grassroots” content (I’m not a big fan of the term “netroots”), has never been greater.

I’m exited about this year’s election because it is our first real intersection of this power with politics. Sure, Howard Dean first used the internet to raise money, but now we’re seeing mass text-messaging, Facebook apps, Twitter feeds, YouTube uploads, Flickr albums, blog entries, etc.

There are so many innovative and interesting ways individuals can organize, evangelize, and campaign for the candidate of their choice. And so much of it’s driven by user-empowerment through social media.

Here’s an example of how the Obama campaign is equipping their supporters with web 2.0 tools as ways to organize and campaign.

"Here, YOU do it..."

So between now and November, who will have the most interesting example(s)? Who will be more effective? Will social media change politics forever? Or will politics help drive advancements in social media?

And ultimately, will it really matter on election night?

I enjoy a glass of wine. Or two. Sometimes three. And as a beginning oenophile, I’ve been using the interweb quite often to expand my universe of wine knowledge. This includes reading tasting notes, looking up new wines to try, buying suggestions, and which local restaurants have great wine lists.

"Ernie, if you continue to read about booze on the internet, you and your liver are gonna wind up like this guy!"

Which brings me to the dustup over Wine Spectator’s recent award to an imaginary restaurant. Apparently, someone invested a fake restaurant in Italy, built a fake website, constructed a fake wine list that included very low-scoring wines, and entered it into the famed magazine’s award submission. Presto! They won an “Award of Excellence.”

Apparently, as part of their “research,” committee folks read some (fake) reviews on Chowhound and also successfully Googled the restaurant’s name in order to verify its legitimacy.

What a great illustration of how social media and the easiness + ubiquitous nature of search can make us all so lazy. And not just drunk-lazy.

How does this apply to us and our clients? For starters, I think the term “authenticity” takes on a deeper meaning. While secondary (market) research has its place, there’s still no substitute for good ol’ fashioned primary research. If anything, it underscores the importance of user/stakeholder interviews, surveys, in-person (and hallway) conversations when it comes to any project or endeavor.

Secondly, companies need to be even MORE diligent in their online and offline activities to effectively convey and support any brand authenticity to their current and potential customers.

Any slight whiff of inauthenticity, exacerbated by the locust-like nature of online social media, can do some serious damage to a brand.