Social networking & Biz Collaboration World - Day 1, Dockside Sydney (#osnbc)

Thanks for my boss who is also crazed into the so called Social Media hype, I had the opportunity to attend the recent Social Networking conference held in Sydney on the 24th, 25th November at Dockside, Cockle Bay wharf.

Had high hopes coming into the morning sessions only to be greeted with free PR from Rebecca Horne, Richard Kimber and Francisco Cordero, the head honchos or MySpace, Friendster and Bebo plugging how great their social networking sites were.

MySpace Customer Segmentation

I counted 14 times that Rebecca reinforced the point that My Space ‘makes money’ to the audience, giving us all an impression that her marketing speel was more about convincing herself that all is not at a loss (and that her job is not at risk) for the 5 year old social networking site who is now up against the likes of Facebook for mind share.

One thing that did come out of the session were some interesting consumer segmentation in the social media sphere (warning: new marketing terms follow):

1. Essentialists – those who use the Internet with a clear motive (eg. To shop, to bank)
   
2. Scene Breakers – those who discover new cultures and ways of doing things
   
3. Netrenpreneurs – those who make a living out of social media
   
4. Transumers – those who aggressively share online content with peers (the virals of the world)
   
5. Connectors – those who use the Internet to organise their social lives
   
6. Collaborators – those who user the Internet to discuss and form opinions on certain topics, brands etc
   

Social Media Trends according to Friendster

What was originally known as the portal is dead: the new portal is now social networks, with the following trends discussed:

1. Social networks is a media platform with unique characteristics: there’s a direct relationship with the user (and hence tracking opinions and conversations can be directly attributed to the appropriate person), and organizations have limited control on what is said
   
2. Developer programs are now more targeted, more sophisticated and deployed much more quickly to the right people
   
3. Integration with other apps such as instant messaging, emails are happening (eg. Facebook + IM)
   
4. Mobile is a natural progression: Asia Pac has 3 times as many individual users on mobile than the PC. We should be closely monitoring and following this trend here
   

 

Using Social networks as a marketing medium

Bebo’s taken an extra step and has positioned their social network as a consumer distribution channel for companies. The Bebo site hosts the online broadcast of products or brands such as Kate Modern. For the brand who is funding the content, the benefits of tracking directly related conversations and refining the product based on these conversations are immensely invaluable.

The common theme that emerged from all players was that they all targeted the 18-24 year old market which makes up around 40% of unique users of the site.

This makes a lot of sense if you simply count heads, however if you then look at what these users are doing on the sites, how long they spend on each site, the over 50s, which make up 25% of the count are possibly the higher value users ie they have deeper pockets, they’re probably more loyal and they’ll probably tell you when your product or service isn’t performing.

Google’s Paul Slakey then took to the stage to talk about Google’s plans with cloud computing apps. Nothing new here:

1. Google’s mantra from the start: organise and make it accessible
   
2. Users are multi-taskers, they collaborate frequently and need simple apps to address their social and business needs online à > 10m users on Google apps
   
3. consumer data and behavioural interactions on search used to build biz apps
   
4. In bed with Salesforce.com, adding SaS apps to cloud 
   

What was insightful was the cost delta between the cloud vs standard model – an average of $177/user. Couple this with app reliability (av 150mins downtime vs Google’s 20mins/year) and no wonder General Electrics has ditched Windows for Google Apps!

Product development focus for the next 6 months? Chrome, Sites (sites.google.com), dashboards, and the Android (G1).

Real life case studies – now we’re talking!

The afternoon was a refreshing start to the day - lots of good learnings on applying web based tools to engage the relevant audiences.

Jeremy Mitchell from Telstra spoke of nowwearetalking.com.au, a blog site aimed at ‘humanising’ Telstra to the public through staff involvement and encouraging discussion with regulators. Turns out that more customers (40% were residential customers) ended up using the site (surprise surprise) to voice opinions on products and have service issues resolved. Key lessons from Telstra: moderate the community, look after your core customers, show progress on topics

Chris Knowles from Heinz Australia took the stage with his social sites: Spilling the Beans (customer forum using Squarespace), the sauce (Intranet based WiKi using DocuWiki) and the Scoup and the Scoup (internal blog). Key learnings that are completely applicable for us:

1. Know your community and take nothing for granted
   
2. Keep it simple (low barriers to entry) (eg. Allow for people to post things on blogs by way of auto-forward from an email address
   
3. User generated content is not self managing, key here is managing conversations (and hence reputation)
   
4. Incentive is everything – value in participating
   
5. Manage expectations (expect it might fail)
   
6. Be prepared, changing info flows ahead
   

 For us, rolling out Wikis, blogs internally is a good pulse check of what to look out for, the audience motives might be different but the dynamics are still the same (since our clients are still human after all! Well, maybe.. J)

 So the Day 1 wrap: social networking is alive and kicking loudly and making headway into the mainstream market. Keen to see more case studies, particularly ones What became apparent was the focus on the B2C space – companies with strong FMCG brands and consumer ended products. However, the thinking remains the same:

1. There’s a lot of rich info about our company and products in the informal sphere of conversations – why not allow for this to be expressed and moderated via a customer based forum? Probably a good way of managing their expectations as well

2. Keep things simple: whether it’s customer facing apps or pricing on products