Pandora Squared - Web and Business Architects, Consultants, Social Media Marketing, Software and Blogging hope not hype

Before leaving back to Manila, I had to get my fix. ManresaRestaurant.com

They were rated 39 of 50 best Restaurants in the World.

Because of that rating and proper site exposure they were ranked under the term “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” in Google. Let me tell you that got them traffic.

Now, they just implemented a blog, not allowing comments, but it’s a step.

Dell also (now) understands that they need a tool to communicate/converse with users.

Direct 2 Dell “one-2-one communications with DELL.” another blog w/ comments.

• You can not control the conversation you can only participate, listen or ignore.

• You must lead in search or be part of the user’s conversations.

• We have an operating system for social networks making the invisible markets and invisible converations visible to your organisation both within and without your company.

What would happen if you enabled your users with the tools that empowered them? Conversation Squared

THE HUB – SCHOOL YOUR WAY

Here is a Random Profile Page

Context = clothes, style

Good Artists Create, Great Artists Copy – Picasso

This is neither good or great. This Sucks!

What is wrong with this picture?

Shopping gone wrong.

I went for a late night grocery run (about midnight) and what I found was NO checkers, 7 unlit checkout stands, 3 automated machines turned off (with grocery bags on the monitors), 1 automated malfunctioning machine, and no employees in sight.

Oh, I also saw one abandoned shopping cart.

CONFIGURING THE USER DOES NOT WORK. PERIOD

• People like the SOCIAL interaction at a grocery store
• People like the SOCIAL interaction at a bank.

This is REAL LIFE Social Software.

• Human to Human relationship and interaction.
• Markets are conversations not machines.
• People won’t forgive machines, people forgive people.

WAKE UP. The user is at the center and they are lost.

All they want is ham or ice cream.

I just ran a search of [“desire lines” human factors HCI]. After several search permutations/iterations, a filetype:doc caught my attention. It is a draft of A CULTURAL ASSETS INVESTMENT STRATEGY FOR CUMBRIA .

More like institutional “desire lines” but the idea that appealed to me was “rural regeneration”. Then I remember coming across this blog on Centers of Excellence. I know that Pale Pilsen is one CoE in the Philippines. So is Peanut Brittle in Baguio, Mango in Cebu, etc. Perhaps we should also start promoting local/regional commons. Meanwhile I am still looking for a framework to model “desire lines”.

SportingNews.com

• Blogs.
• Buddy networks.
• Ranking (from rookie 1 star to MVP 5 star).
• Empowers users to comment and moderate by flagging capability which endangers ranking.

• Traffic jumped to 86 million page views with 1.6 million unique visitors.

• Stickyness leads the sports category with 79.1 minutes.

• Plus Ad Revenues rose 50%

Not bad for Sports Fan Pride

A mix of attention and conversation.

... but not for Campusbug, h2o, diigo, or chalksite, or a combo of them. Point is you do not even have to be in the classroom to learn competencies that the Knowledge Economy, no, the Creative Economy demands.

visualizing online social networks

“Vizster provides a visualization of such services, providing an interactive sociogram for exploring the links between network members. In addition to visualizing “friendship” linkages, Vizster supports a range of exploratory search features, providing visualization of the rich profile data characteristic of these services, features which traditional sociograms are not designed to communicate.”

Vizster reflecting a search query for the term “simpsons”. Matching nodes highlight in yellow, as do text matches in the profile panel.

Check out the video demonstration This stuff makes me drool.

Planting grass and waiting for paths to appear.

Check out Danah’s You Tube Videos

StyleHive: Social bookmarking for the product and shopping obsessed.

eBay is Walmart as StyleHive is to Marks&Spencer

Okay, maybe not a good comparison, but close. I’ve been a regular eBayer – both as a seller and buyer – and so when I saw StyleHive – I go like – OMG! OMG! I just went gaga. Literally.

StyleHive is a social bookmarking site of … titillating … products scattered all over the cyberworld. Stylehive is about the excitement of finding and sharing fresh new things on the net.

Each product submitted by the members undergo screening by the editors. This may seem to defeat the purpose of online community concept and user-generated content, but this, in fact just adds spice to StyleHive. Think of a cozy village store full of one-of-a-kind treasures.

But the site does not look like any village store. In fact, it may resemble more like a top-of-the-line shopping boutique – Louis Vuitton perhaps?

The site is an epitome of a web 2.0 site.

Clean.

Simple.

Elegant.

StyleHive CEO Michael Carrier believes that design matters, and mostly that it is not about how many features you have but having as few of the right features as possible. (We)They constantly are striving to remove things that aren’t needed rather than add them.

What StyleHive was able to use effectively was social bookmarking. Carrier firmly believes that bookmarking sites like the Stylehive are here to stay and will become part of the Internet application world, the same way email, search and chat have all before it. Bookmarking in a social context will become as natural as email eventually. It will be the method through which we collaborate and seek out shopping recommendations from others.

On web 2.0 and bookmarking, Carrier leaves this wisdom:

The web 2.0 movement is a small part of a larger destiny for the net, where just having connection to it gives you everything you need.

Tag. Search. Sea of Information. Bingo! The power of tagging.

Facebook announced early this week that it has expanded its membership beyond the campus by opening its service to 1,000 work networks.

“The number one request we receive from people is to have the ability to invite friends outside their college network,� said Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO in a recent press release. “We’re committed to growing with our alumni and increasing the site’s utility and availability to them as they leave college.�

Whereas Facebook determines if a person is affiliated with a university or high school based on one’s email address (with a “.edu� suffix), it will also now verify the eligibility of a new registrant based on the corporate email address.

Diversity and graduating college students as reasons to extend beyond academic membership

Melanie Deitch, Facebook’s director of marketing, clarified in an interview with ZDnet that “We wanted to get a cross-section of industries, as well as geographies. We wanted to have some diversity to it.”

Justin Smith of Inside Facebook thus observed in a blog entry prior to the 1,000-company announcement:

�Note the way that Facebook has chosen to seed the corporate market: instead of specifically focusing on one sector or industry, they’ve chosen leading companies in several industries that typically hire top-caliber grads (consulting, software development, hardware development, consumer products).

The company apparently hopes the Facebook meme will trickle-down to other companies in these sectors by traversing the professional networks of hip workers and, eventually, that it will spread to other sectors through alumni and non-professional networks.�

However, a more important reason for this development must be the maintenance of its membership as nearly 30% of college students are graduating by the end of the current academic year, according to Facebook’s announcement:

“One-third of college students on Facebook will have graduated and headed into the workforce by the completion of the 2006 academic year. Forty-five percent of Facebook’s college alumni currently come back to the site every day. Facebook’s work networks will allow them to connect with the people around them. Alumni can join their work network from their existing accounts and then invite co-workers to join. In addition, anyone from a supported company can register at www.facebook.com.”

Find out if Facebook supports your company on this page.

Related links:

Facebook rolls out corporate accounts

Facebook goes corporate

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Socialnetwork

1. Who is the story for?
2. What is the story?
3. Where are the key knowledge pools/information hubs?
4. Who are the key user producers?
5. How will we reward users?
6. How will we collaborate with users?
7. How will we measure distribution?
8. How will we measure ‘actions’?
9. How will we control the message?
10. How will we measure success?

Social media marketing, to be successful, must always put the users or consumers at the the center, no matter what the channel through which an enterprise delivers the message. In the form of a piece of web real estate, users determine the success of a social network, tagging, user-generated content framework. That a company has adopted the web as a platform for delivering a service or information does not mean it has engaged in social media marketing but has only begun to provide a platform for conversations to happen among members of a target market.

Social media marketing is different from traditional point-and-shoot variety, in that it engages a more long-term conversation between the enterprise and the target market, between the marketer and the target market and most especially among members of the market. Far from saying that the days of whiz-bang hyper expensive advertising and promotions are over, social media marketing actually complements the stil-mainstream approach. And if conducted in the right way, it could prove to be more successful that what it supplements.

To put Reid’s ideas succinctly, marketers should craft a good story, allow the customers to develop its plot, and let them talk about how it progresses in channels where they feel comfortable talking about the story.

Gary Reid is the author of The Web Driven Entrepreneur.