FreshNetworks Blog

There was an interesting piece in this weekend’s FT, in the Q&A section (see here). A reader asks if the ‘contact lists’ held by his employees on LinkedIn are actually owned by his business.

This is a timely question and one that I suspect many employers would be interested in. LinkedIn, and other social networks, are being increasingly used for business networking. Either by individuals of their own initiative or through encouragement from their employer.

The former case is becoming particularly common. We’ve noted before that people use different social networks for different purposes (see post here) and it’s becoming commonplace for people to want a place where they can network with their business colleagues online, in the same way that they might use Facebook, MySpace, Flickr or another service to network with friends.

We also see the latter case. Employees specifically encouraging their staff to  build large networks on LinkedIn and the like, then to use these networks as a route to sales, or as a source of new candidates for roles. It is this latter case that the FT question was about, and the response from the lawyer may come as a surprise to many people who build up their contacts in this way.

I think you have a strong argument that you do own the “database” of contacts, particularly as the internet medium through which the sites are accessed are owned by you and the networking is done as part and parcel of the employees’ contractual duties.

The argument is that a database of contacts that an employee builds up as part of their job role will belong to the employer they are working for at the time. In these cases the database would be held on the employer premises (or more likely on their network). The lawyer suggests that contacts built up through LinkedIn could be no different, especially as they have been built during company time and through the firm’s resources (a firm laptop maybe or via the firm’s network connection).

In this case the entire contact set would be owned by the employer, much in the same way that, theoretically at least, your Rolodex and business-card collection is also owned by your employer.

Of course it would be interesting to see what would ever happen if a case like this came to trial, I suspect it may not be as easy as this to ascertain ownership of a social network contacts list.

Some more reading

• Not friends anymore
• Growth of Social Networks is also good for your Job Health
• LinkedIn, Your Personal Brand and creating more buzz!
• What Does “Friend” Mean?
• The new employee connection: Social networking behind the firewall
• Your Take Roundup::People Get Picky on Adding Friends on Social Media Sites

I’ve been travelling around the country this weekend, visiting relatives, and as I browsed the magazines at Nottingham station on my way back to London today I noticed something strange. A magazine devoted entirely to Facebook. With a few minutes to spare before my train, I picked up the magazine. It offers a “complete guide to social networking” and includes things like a step-by-step guide of setting up a profile and famous Facebookers.

I have to admit to being a little baffled by this magazine. I wasn’t quite sure who it was aimed at and why they might buy it. Social networking and online communities are a very different sort of media, they allow you to do old things in new ways and to do completely new things. They also change rapidly. Facebook, for instance, has changed a lot over the last few weeks and changes to security and processes are ongoing.

Print, by it’s very nature, is out-of-date when it is published. There is a time-delay between composing a piece and it being in the hands of a reader. Social networks and web 2.0 reduces this time-delay to near-zero. So how, then, could a magazine be a useful source of information and help on a social network like Facebook?

I really am at a loss.

Some more reading

• Which Social Portal Will Be Yours?
• Communities = more than the sum of their social media parts
• Social Ad Networks: Win, Lose, or Draw?
• 10 Family-Friendly Social Networking Sites for You

A few days ago, I wrote about how the 2008 Beijing Olympics should be the perfect area for social media coverage of the event itself (see post here). Social media is also being used by many big brands to capitalise upon the Games.

The very reasons we identified for social media coverage of the Games, are being capitalised upon by some big brands, whether or not they are official sponsors.

Here is a couple of some of the best:

• McDonald’s has built a viral game called The Lost Ring, where the player uncovers the history of the Olympics (adventures in Ancient Greece and all).  It’s a subtle marketing tool for McDonald’s. Their branding is not present in the game and they are pitched more as a sponsor. The terms of the game state: “McDonald’s is proud to sponsor The Lost Ring and bring the spirit of the Olympic Games to people around the world.”
• Lenovo is the more obvious backer of Voices of the Olympic Games. Their site contains blogs from some 100 athletes at this year’s Games and the branding is prominent. The product is also heavily positioned - the site stating that the athletes were provided “new [Lenovo] Ideapad laptops and video cameras to capture their experiences.”

These examples contrast very different approaches. McDonald’s are creating an experience that people will enjoy and will no doubt ensure that people know who it is that is behind the game. This is a subtle way of marketing. They capitalise upon the enthusiasm for both the Olympic Games and for social media to create and experience people will buy into and enjoy. That they may later associate it with McDonald’s is part of the strategy, but this shows social media fitting into a total marketing strategy for the brand during the Games.

Lenovo on the other hand is really branding social media activities. It has given product and a platform to some athletes and is branding their output. This approach is more overt and although it will raise awareness of the product and the brand it is not really doing anything different to it’s other sponsorship of the Games. Lenovo’s branding is all over the Games and is on the blogs too. This is less of strategic social media marketing and more a branding exercise across all media.

Both approaches will be successful. The Olympic Games are a marketers dream - the audiences are huge and the passion is great. Using social media to enhance the experience of the Games (either by providing entertainment and games, or by providing branded content) can only be a positive thing.

Some more reading

• Social media and the 2008 Olympic Games
• Why the Olympics should be the perfect social media event
• Olympics: BBC promises ‘cornucopia of content’
• Beijing Olympics: Opening ceremony fuels internet traffic surge
• How Some Covered the Opening Ceremony

I watched about an hour of the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics live yesterday. It was perfectly timed to coincide with lunch in London and so I sat at my desk and watched live streaming thanks to the BBC. At the same time I was following what other people around the world thought about it on Twitter. And later in the afternoon I looked at photos on Flickr and saw what my friends thought on Facebook.

I suspect my experience was not alone - whereas in previous years my main source of Olympic news and events was the television and the thoughts and opinions of reporters and commentators. This year I suspect I will follow it more through other people and through social media.

This isn’t just because of the time difference - most of the action will be in the morning and early-afternoon UK time so I’ll be at work, in front of a computer but not a TV. This is because if there were ever a perfect candidate for coverage in social networks, online communities and social media, then the Olympics surely must be it.

From my experience with clients, the aspects that are common in successful online communities typically include:

1. A shared or common interest or goal
2. The subject may be broad but allows interest groups to form
3. A subject people are or can be passionate about
4. Enthusiasts and leaders who will help to shape the community
5. An experience that is or can be inherently social, that people want to share with others
6. A subject that can create strong opinions and passionate views
7. Regularly changing and updated content
8. Media and varying content types so different people can interact in different ways
9. You can be more interested in the issues as you are in the people you are discussing them with
10. An ability for the online experience to be supplemented with offline experience

The Olympics is one of those subjects that meets all of these criteria. People unite behind it and are enthusiastic on a number of levels - the Games as a whole, individual sports and individual countries. I like the event as a whole and what it stands for, but I also have my favourite sports (the cycling, rowing and track events probably my favourite in that order), I also obviously want to see a good performance from Team GB.

Many people will have strong and impassioned views on any or all of these levels. Some people are extremely passionate and would want to be leaders or enthusiasts online. But the experience is inherently social - you want to talk about it with others (as I saw yesterday on Twitter) and anything that allows you to do this would be seized upon.

The events themselves lend themselves to regularly updated content. With constant updates on results and real-time feeds on events as they happen. It’s also a very media rich event, with photo, video, audio and text coming together to describe and enhance your experience. Creating ways that you can share and experience these will increase reach and attract people.

The nature of the Games themselves suits online communities. In these people tend to unite round issues and themes rather than, necessarily, round individuals and their friends. You might want to discuss the performance in the Team Pursuit heats and share opinions with a variety of people who you don’t know but who are also passionate about that sport.

So, if I was evaluating the Olympics as a candidate for online communities or successful use of social media, I’d say the chances of success were high. Of course, I’ve written elsewhere about how even the most ideal candidate for an online community can fail if it is executed or managed badly. But the positive signs are there.

That’s why over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be watching and following the discussions on Twitter, the photos on Flickr, the videos on YouTube and the discussions in forums and communities across the Internet. It strikes me that Beijing 2008 is the first time that we will see mass use of social media to cover the games, and I’d expect that this brings out a higher quality and broader range of debate, information and coverage than ever before.

Some places you can follow the 2008 Beijing Olympic

• BBC Olympics coverage
• Qik 2008 Olympics
• Beijing Olympics 2008 YouTube Channel
• Real-time update of Olympics discussions on Twitter
• Athlete blogs (from Lenovo)
  

Some more reading

• Social media and the 2008 Olympic Games
• Olympics: BBC promises ‘cornucopia of content’
• Beijing Olympics: Opening ceremony fuels internet traffic surge
• How Some Covered the Opening Ceremony

A few weeks ago I posted about the nature of friendships and manners online and in social networks (see post here). Over the weekend I heard a conversation that made me think again about this and post a bit more.

Two people on a train from Cambridge to London were discussing Facebook. Let’s call them Mary and Simon. Mary was bemoaning how she doesn’t use it that much because she doesn’t want “people to know what I’m doing all the time”. Simon on the other hand found that he was slimming down his friendship group because he didn’t “want to know what everybody was doing all the time”.

This conversation highlighted for me a rather developed aspect of the nature of friendships in social networks. One of the features of Facebook, Twitter and other networks is the ability to constantly update what you are doing, what you have stumbled upon online, photos of events and so forth. This can be seen in two ways, the second of which is often overlooked:

1. You are sharing information with your friends - you update what you are doing, post photos and write notes that you want your friends to read. It’s a way of you keeping them up to date
2. Your friends are being shared with by you - this constant flow of updates and and information is received along with those of every other friend

In terms of how you deal with situation, there is a need for people to understand both of these and then to respond to them. As I said in my previous post, social networking manners is an emerging area and one where people are developing their own approaches to mirror their different uses of the networks.

Some people update regularly, share everything they find and will constantly tell you what they are doing. Others use the networks only report on things that they would possibly previously have done via email. Both are valid approaches but can come into conflict with each other. When a small number of your friends update regularly on everything and other very rarely, then your news feeds will be overrun by this minority.

Of course there are two ways of dealing with this - either unfriending the frequent updaters, or conversely adding even more friends so that their updates get drowned out. But perhaps the best thing to do is to reevaluate what it is you use your social networks for.

Different social networks are for different things. I update Facebook more than LinkedIn, for example, and befriend different people on each of these. Whilst my friends on Facebook may want to know about the wedding I was at over the weekend, those on LinkedIn probably don’t.

When you think about accepting friends and using social networks it worth thinking about who else you are friends with their and what, for you, the purpose of this network is.

Sharing is great, but share the right things with the right people in the right places. Some people want to be shared with regularly and others don’t. The beauty of social networks, and one of the reasons I expect that the proliferation of networks and communities will continue, is that you can go to different places to do different things.

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I have worked a lot in the past with Education clients, especially with organisations who were trying to ammend their offering to prepare learners for the jobs they might be doing in 5, 10 or 20 years. It was an interesting time and I learnt a lot. One fact that struck me was that the role of education is to prepare people for jobs that don’t yet exist.

I was reminded this week when I was thinking about Generation Y and how they are changing the web (I posted about this before) and the world of work. To some extent Generation Y is having a significant impact on both of these. The way they are plugged in, value peer opinions, don’t see TV as the main medium and their social consciousness (amongst other things) means that they are changing the way they want to use the web and the way they want to work.

Another way to look at this situation is that the web and work are adapting to meet the changing needs of Generation Y. A narrow distinction, but a difference nonetheless. Perhaps it’s the case that rather than being the driving agents of change, change is happening to meet their needs.

This then reminded me of a presentation I saw last year. This is the UK version of a presentation originally developed by Karl Fisch. It was presented by Microsoft at a Building Schools for the Future conference in London - a conference about the scheme that is rebuilding all British schools to prepare them to deliver the changing needs of learners.

I think the presentation shows clearly (and quite powerfully) that change in a variety of arenas means that the environment people  are now growing up in is different. If Generation Y has changed the way we work and use the web, then the next Generation is going to face even bigger changes and will have to adapt and adopt to meet these. Generation Y has changed the way we work and use the web. The real push should be to change the way we learn too.

Some more reading

• Generation Y: Too demanding at work?
• What Will Globalization Do to Languages? A Freakonomics Quorum
• Can New Media Be Taught in Schools?
• Who has more data about Gen Y: Facebook or the US Government?

For the last few days I’ve been privy to an interesting  example of how not to use social networks for marketing. It all started when somebody I don’t know (let’s call him John) asked to be my friend on Facebook.

I don’t know John and have never known John. It became clear that we were both members of a couple of groups and that was, I assumed, where he had got my details from. I have a fairly tight group of friends on Facebook and use it mainly to keep in touch with people I know and don’t get to see as often as I like. So I haven’t accepted his invite. I did look at his profile though and the very day he asked me to be his friend he also befriended almost 200 other people.

People are popular, but often not all at the same time like this so I wanted to find out why.

As I checked back at John’s profile, signs came with his changing statuses. First was one telling us that his new book was out in a few months and we should call his PA to reserve a copy. Next came an update about a radio interview he was doing and then came one about an event.

It may be a coincidence but it seemed as though John had found people with interests aligned with his new book and asked them to be his friend so that he could constantly market his new book through their feeds.

Clever you might think and there are lots of people (myself included) who feed their blog posts and other items through Facebook. The problem came in John’s approach to adding friends.

Over the last couple of days posts have appeared on his wall saying things like

Thanks for the ad. Who are you?

This wasn’t just spam. John is a real person who has found people with similar interests to him and asked to befriend them. This happens all the time. That John was trying to use this for marketing just highlights the complexities of using Facebook for this.

Facebook is a very personal space. It’s the place I go to to find out about my friends, post my photos and read my messages. This can be a very difficult context for brands, or anybody trying to market a product, to enter. You are interrupting a user’s experience and need to do it sensibly and sensitively. Whilst some people will be happy to receive your updates to their news-feed, others will see this as an intrusion.

Of course dealing with this is easy. Just don’t befriend them. From the marketers perspective this makes it difficult to control who you can get your message to.

Some more reading

• Facebook Marketing
• The Facebook Platform is Biased Toward “Fun” Apps
• Three Reasons To Become Friends With FriendFeed
• Social Networking - Go Where the Fish Are!

I read in today’s Financial Times how the New York Times has struck a deal with LinkedIn. This is just a further example of the New York Times becoming more social (see our previous post here), and for the FT this is a sign of a significant change in the traditional media industry:

The deal, between the New York Times and LinkedIn, the largest online social network for professionals, is one of most far-reaching attempts yet by a traditional media company to tap into the booming popularity of online networks to super-charge its own services.

The deal means that personal profile data entered into LinkedIn will be used to make the content and advertising an individual sees on the New York Times site targeted to their industry, country, interests of profession.

This is a really interesting example for two reasons:

1. It shows how traditional media and publishing firms are having to adapt to the challenges and opportunities presented by social media and social networks. They need to change the way that they offer their content and be prepared for people wanting to interact with it in different ways. The barriers between the social and the editorial are blurring.
2. It highlights a significant benefit of social networks - the depth and richness of data that is gathered and kept by these sites. That the New York Times has struck a deal to use LinkedIn profile data to target advertising shows just how detailed this data is. With people adding and contributing to their social networks on an increasingly regular basis, the quality of this data will only heighten.

I expect us to see similar arrangements and innovations that build on these two reasons in the future. Social networks will seek to monetise the depth and quality of data they have gathered and traditional media and publishing firms are looking for new ways to target their readers. It would seem that a pairing of the two is a good solution and maybe the New York Times and LinkedIn will show us how good it could be.

Some more reading

• New York Times to offer targeted stories to LinkedIn users
• LinkedIn And New York Times Partnership
• New York Times, LinkedIn Enter Content Partnership
• Targeted ‘Times’ articles coming to LinkedIn
• Study reveals the mainstream media should link out more

I read a good post from LouisGray about the social rules of social networks. Who do you follow and why? Who don’t you follow and why not?

The online etiquette of social networks and online communities is an interesting and emerging area, and one that tools such as OpenSocial will only influence. For instance, I have profiles on a range of sites, from LinkedIn and Facebook, to Twitter and FriendFeed, to niche industry social networks and ones of people with similar interests to me. I often have different friends on each of these and in fact probably use each one for very different reasons.

These reasons are worth investigating. Some people choose to become friends with only their close circle of real-world friends, or conversely may accept every friend request they get. As LouisGray points out:

Suddenly, the issue of friending became less about wanting to actually follow real friends, or peers, and instead, became an arms race - to get the most followers, to follow the most people, to rise up a leaderboard, or feel some kind of achievement because you could claim a friend as a household name.

So whether you have your close friends, your wider friendship group, or as many friends as you can lay your hands on, you have a set of social media manners that define who you invite when.

Some people talk about having social network friends. I think this is a misnomer - you don’t have social network friends, but rather have Facebook friends, LinkedIn friends, Twitter friends and so forth. Not everybody I follow on Twitter are friends on LinkedIn, and I probably wouldn’t one some LinkedIn connections to follow me on Facebook.

Social media manners are actually quite advanced and getting more so as people adopt more networks and communities. I have decided that I want to use Facebook for certain purposes and so invite appropriate people; LinkedIn I’ve decided is for other purposes and so invite a different mix of people. The distinction isn’t clear-cut with a lot of overlap, so these friendship groups become blurred.

I would imagine that everybody has slightly different groups of friends on each different social network or online community they are a member of. I would also expect that their is blurring between them. Social networks are developing, rather than having distinct and distinguishing brand identities and so mean different things to different people. This means that the policy I have for using LinkedIn and making friends there is probably different to the one everybody else has.

This is where the real blurring is. Social networks are centred on me and so I decide how and why I use it. I develop my own social media manners and then develop and test these. The world of social media is changing and developing all the time, and we are helping to shape this by the mere fact of using them.

Some more reading

• You Are Not My Friend
• Choose Wisely: Scrutinizing Your Social Network Connections
• Facebook Facelift Targets Aging Users and New Competitors
• Experiments and Lessons Learned in Social Media - Part III
• The Intangible Risk and Opportunity: Your Network
• What are your tips for using your social networking profile for professional work?
• What are your tips for using your social networking profile for professional work?

I came across an interesting set of slides today from Erik Herschkorn looking at social networks and business. There is a lot written about this at the moment and often the same ground is covered by all people. What I liked about this presentation is that it suggests some ways to segment the different social networks, specifically from a business perspective.

The presentation is in French so a summary of some of the interesting points below.

• You are the centre of your world; social networks are the centre of the online world. Slides 7 and 14 show how in the real world the individual is at the centre - probably linked to their family, friends, work colleagues etc - and social networks are the centre of the online world - connected to your profile, friends, applications and other sites. This approach mirrors our understanding at FreshNetworks that social networks centre on the individual.
• Distinguish between networks depending on openness. Slide 11 shows one of the segmentations of social networks proposed. The critical axis here shows how social networks such as Facebook rely on real identities, whereas YouTube allows fake identities to be created. This distinction means that the sites are suited to very different purposes. YouTube is more about the content than the people - the social networks are about individuals and so identity is important.
• B2B or B2C; leisure or professional. The segmentation on slide 12 is perhaps the most developed, this shows how you need to distinguish between social networks that are aimed at the consumer and those aimed at business. At the same time you must distinguish between professional networks, and leisure networks. Looking at the various social networks in this way helps understand which is appropriate in different circumstances; it also shows how complex and diverse social networks are.

As with any segmentation, these are most useful to help start a discussion about social networks, rather than being a real and true segmentation of networks. I think it is interesting to consider how complex the social network market is. How different some are and why the way you use them must reflect these complexities.

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Some more reading

• What Does Your Audience Need
• Definition + Social Media = Need stats to join the conversation?
• Web 2.0 Work Guide for Gen Y
• Social Networks, building with zero resources