I note with interest that Facebook has a new profile coming next week. I realise that sites do periodically need to be freshened up but any kind of change on this scale has to generate problems; users have to learn the new layout, programmers have to test and maybe change their applications etc. Is this wise? Unless there is a substantial benefit to the new layout (and I can’t see that) then it risks alienating lots and lots of people.
As we struggle with our new email implementation I’ve been looking at the whole area of how we communicate, both inbound and outbound. Whilst hunting around my attention turned to Flock, a browser I have used for the social-side of life. It offers a neat RSS and social portal (Facebook etc) interface and with some careful configuration I’m testing using Flock for the vast majority of my inbound and outbound communication. In fact, this post is originated inside Flock and nowhere near our WordPress server!
I recently published a post on how you could start to use trusted third-party organisations such as the BBC to help your natural search results. There is another step forwards you can take to help this process. If you recall from my post the most important thing about your network of feeds is the quality of them as measured by Google, Yahoo etc.
You need to look at creating independent bodies of information that are uniquely and directly accessible on the net. A good example of this would be the creation of a forum for your customers to talk about your products and services - this independent source would start to build a quality rating on the internet and the fact that it (frequently) links back to your site means that this quality is bestowed upon your site.
Add a blog from an industry leader who works for your organisation, add several (or hundreds) of blogs by customers, suppliers and partners and you are starting to build you own network. The great thing about this is that any of the sites within your network can now attract feeds from other sites so the affect of this is to greatly widen your net (no pun intended) and generate a snowball effect.
It doesn’t need to stop here, Wikipedia is another example of a high rank site and the great thing about Wiki is that you can add, edit and change the entries in there yourself. So, do you have a page on Wiki? Try searching yourself. Is there any pages on Wiki that you or one of your staff could contribute to?
And what about Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, MySpace, Bebo, Piczo? The list keeps growing …
So much these days is made of your trust rating on the web that there is an argument saying that those with rarer names are easier to find and therefore easier to trust. So if you’re called John Smith then it is highly likely you will be lost in a deluge of other John Smiths or, worse still, mistaken for someone else. The growth of the social networking has seen an explosion in name searching is now one of the commonest activities, whether it’s inside Facebook of directly on Google.
Time to change your name, maybe?
The business version of Facebook? Probably not as it won’t get as cluttered or generate as much social drama with it’s pure for business approach. I like it so far and you can find me here - I’m still new though - and I can recommend the expert section where you can ask questions and get (mainly) good answers.
Following on from a post I made a few weeks ago on Pods I tried to turn the thinking on it head and see how the corporate world could benefit from analysing the use of pods and pod behaviour. Most companies now realise that they need to do more than simply put up a web-site, run a few email shots and start a blog - they realise the traffic (raw fuel) flows around these places and lots of other unrelated places such as independent blogs.
Understanding this “sphere” is something I have been trying to make sense of over the last months and I’ve always used words such as space or sphere and wondered why it didn’t feel right. My initial foray into Facebook provided the trigger for me to realise that it’s less about space/place/area and more about connections, family if you will. Hence pod.
So what role does my pod play, if any, when it comes to deciding how the corporate world should deal with me. It stands to reason that better understanding me allows the corporate world to sell/promote/educate in a far more focused way so the question then is how do corporates learn from this?
I think this is early days and I think the corporate world has to understand how these pods work before they can leverage them so step one is to build the corporate pod, the places and connections that the corporate touches. Understand this influence and then extend it outwards, sorry no solutions yet - just a mindset and an idea I’m going to try this week and see how well it goes down with a client. I’ll keep you posted.
The New Media world finally shows that it has lost the plot by the great and mighty Nielsen deciding somewhat belatedly that page views are now not the way to measure sites and the way to measure them is by time spent on the site. What is going on?
I think, aside from the obvious mistakes that time-based measurement causes we need to realise that the web is used for different things by different people. Comparing Google’s page-view/time connected metric against, say, Facebook is just plain wrong - it’s like comparing time spent in your car versus time spent in the office - it is completely unrelated.
What it did make me think about was the (sort of) obvious next step of putting a Google search onto Facebook. No ones really goes to Google with the aim of staying there, it is a transit place and in fact the better the answer means the quicker the journey starts (so a huge poke in the eye to Nielsen!).
Many of us now certain forums, communities and other such places as regular drop-in centres and it would be so convenient to integrate these together. I know some people would argue that the Google toolbar means you don’t need to do this but it would be a great chance for Facebook (and Google) to start to tailor the results to the search request based on what they (jointly?) know.
