Blogs

Artesia Spotlight is a monthly review of key news in the fields of social media, user communities and virtual worlds. If you want to be the first to read the news, you can subscribe to receive Artesia Spotlight by e-mail on this page.

2010 Predictions Spotlight

Pete Cashmore, founder of social media blog Mashable, wrote a list of 10 Web trends that will define the Web in the upcoming year. Cashmore predicts that the real-time communications trend will continue to grow and location (powered by GPS in smartphones) will provide another layer of information to existing Web content. Mobile phones will also help to increase the popularity of augmented reality and mobile payments. In the field of entertainment, Internet TV, movies, and social gaming with virtual currencies will continue to increase in popularity among consumers. Also, the transition to cloud computing will continue in the next year.

Research Spotlight

Marketing company Razorfish released the data from their annual Digital Brand Experience Study, which surveyed 1000 US "connected consumers". The data shows that 40% of respondents friended brands on Facebook, while 25% followed brands on Twitter. Consumers mainly like to friend/follow brands on Facebook and Twitter for exclusive deals and promotions. Other reasons for friending/following are being a current customer (more popular on Facebook) and access to interesting or entertaining content. Interestingly, 65% of consumers also reported that an online experience with the brand changed their opinion about the brand or the products it offers, and 97% reported that online experiences influence whether or not they purchased something from the brand.

Post Spotlight

In his post The Eight Stages Of Listening, Jeremiah Owyang presents a matrix of listening strategies related to social media. The matrix provides a short description, needed resources and impacts of each stage. The matrix can be used as a tool to start a discussion in your own company and to identify which is your company's current stage and what could be done to move to a higher stage of listening to customers through social media. 

Other news

• Salesforce.com has announced Salesforce Chatter, a platform that will allow companies to have their own private social networking site. The service will become generally available next year.
• Microsoft will offer an application marketplace within Sharepoint 2010.
• Linden Lab announced Second Life Enterprise, a solution that allows companies to host their own private virtual workplaces built on the Second Life platform.

Artesia Spotlight is a monthly review of key news in the fields of social media, user communities and virtual worlds. If you want to be the first to read the news, you can subscribe to receive Artesia Spotlight by e-mail on this page.

Case Study Spotlight

Forrester Research has announced the winners of the 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards. The awards spotlight the best social technology use cases based on business performance. The announcement on the Groundswell blog also features descriptions of what the winning companies did and the business benefits that resulted from their social technology use.

Post Spotlight

Social media blog Mashable features a post about how we can measure social media ROI by defining concrete goals and using different metrics and analysis tools to measure the success of our social media efforts. The post also provides links to some of the best tools for monitoring and measuring social media.

Post Spotlight

In today's spotlighted post, Jeremiah Owyang writes about How Local Businesses Can Benefit From Mobile Social Networks. It is worth noting that browser maker Opera is finding that mobile web usage is growing fast, while other reports are finding that social networking sites are dominating the mobile web. Consumers are therefore getting used to having access to their favorite social networks whenever they go, and the question for businesses is, how they can use the advantages social networks provide on mobile devices. Some of the most obvious advantages are location based services and the opportunity to make physical locations more interactive.

Other news

• Google has announced Social Search, an experimental feature that uses data from your extended social network to find more relevant search results.
• Facebook has announced a developer roadmap, which highlights some of the important upcoming changes on the Facebook platform. Facebook will mainly try to simplify communication with users, improve application discovery and engagement, and also provide new APIs and simplified policies. Additionally, Facebook also unveiled their new Platform Live Status page, where developers can monitor performance issues and bugs.
• Social networking site hi5 has decided to place more emphasis on games and their virtual currency in their recent website redesign.

Artesia Spotlight is a monthly review of key news in the fields of social media, user communities and virtual worlds. If you want to be the first to read the news, you can subscribe to receive Artesia Spotlight by e-mail on this page.

Resource Spotlight

As the popularity of social media sites continues to rise, many companies are developing a social media presence. That includes thinking about how their employees communicate through social media. For this reason, companies often decide to write their own social media policy. Chris Boudreaux, author of the upcoming book “Social Media Governance”, has compiled a database of over a hundred social media policies from various organization, which can provide a good starting point for your company's social media policy.

Tool Spotlight

Facebook and Google are both trying hard to provide easy to use social features for website owners. Recently, both companies simplified the process of adding Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect respectively to a website. Both services allow users to interact with websites using their existing Facebook or Google credentials. Facebook introduced Facebook Connect Wizard and developer's Playground, and Google Friend Connect setup now no longer requires administrators to upload additional files.

On this year's International Translation Day both companies also announced tools that allow site visitors to translate a website into multiple languages. Facebook has introduced Translations for Facebook Connect, an application that also helped Facebook itself translate the site into 65 languages, while Google announced their website translator gadget powered by Google Translate.

Other news

• Facebook now has over 300 million users all over the world and is cash flow positive.
• Facebook has partnered with Nielsen to develop better tools for online marketers. Their first joint product, Nielsen BrandLift, will measure the effectiveness of Facebook ads.
• IBM has launched LotusLive iNotes, a web-based e-mail service for businesses, which also includes contact management and calendars. iNotes is being marketed as a less expensive and easier to manage alternative to systems like Microsoft Exchange, and is also clearly competing with Gmail and Google Apps for businesses.
• LinkedIn has launched Profile Organizer, a service which allows LinkedIn Premium users to save profiles and organize contacts into folders.
• Nokia has acquired social networking travel site Dopplr.
• Google has launched a new microsite, which features various interesting Internet stats for the United Kingdom.

Artesia Spotlight is a monthly review of key news in the fields of social media, user communities and virtual worlds. If you want to be the first to read the news, you can subscribe to receive Artesia Spotlight by e-mail on this page.

Research Spotlight

Forrester Research has published the newest Social Technographics Profile data, which classifies customers into six levels of participation in social technologies. Forrester's research has shown that over half of online Americans are joining social networking sites and nearly 75% are consuming social content at least once a month. Interestingly enough, the number of consumers creating and collecting social content grew slowly, while the number of critics didn't grow at all. Overall, social technology has seen a large increase in 2009, mainly due to the popularity of social networking sites. However, it is also worth noting that Europe (on average) is still lagging behind the American market, which means there is still a lot of room for improvement and growth in the field of social technologies.

Report Spotlight

Analyst firm Gartner has released this year's Gartner’s Hype Cycle Special Report, which examines the maturity of technologies and trends across different industries. Gartner sees Web 2.0, cloud computing, Internet TV, virtual worlds and service-oriented architecture (SOA) among the potentially transformational technologies that will become mainstream in less than five years.

Video Spotlight

The video Social Media Revolution highlights some of the most interesting statistics related to social technologies, which show how these technologies are transforming the way we interact with one another and also the way we do business.

Other news

• Facebook has acquired online sharing service FriendFeed.
• Business social networking site LinkedIn now has over 45 million users.
• Google has launched social gadgets for iGoogle (its personalized Google page). Social gadgets allow users to share and collaborate on content and even play games with their friends.
• According to a new report published by the European Commission, almost half of Europeans use the internet every day, with those aged 16 to 24 high above the average. Unsurprisingly, low internet usage numbers are mainly seen among the low-income families, the unemployed, the elderly and among citizens with low levels of education.

Artesia Spotlight is a monthly review of key news in the fields of social media, user communities and virtual worlds. If you want to be the first to read the news, you can subscribe to receive Artesia Spotlight by e-mail on this page.

Report Spotlight

The number of social networking users has doubled since 2007, according to a new report from Forrester Research. The latest report from Universal McCann has also noted that internet users are increasingly centering their online life around social networks like Facebook and MySpace. They are also choosing to share their content within these social networks instead of specialized content sharing sites like Blogger and Flickr. That is because social networking sites enable users to do more things in the same place, and they also make it easier for users to share their content within closed groups. In fact, a new report by Anderson Analytics has revealed that almost half of social networking site users prefer to connect only with family and real life friends.

Post Spotlight

In his post The Five Ways Companies Let Employees Participate in the Social Web, Jeremiah Owyan breaks down five approaches to social media usage in the workplace (from the extremely conservative to the extremely liberal) and provides the benefits and dangers of each of these approaches. As Owyan writes, choosing the right model depends on your company culture and industry, but as the social web becomes commonplace, companies will probably have to lead towards the more open model, where everyone in the company is invited to participate.

Book Spotlight

Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail, has made his newest book Free: The Future of a Radical Price available for free in all digital forms to illustrate his point that in some instances giving things away can help you make more profit. In fact, the book has made its way onto the New York Times Best Sellers list in its first week of sales despite all the free copies that were given away. Free is based on Anderson's last year's Wired Magazine article Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.

Other news

• Twitter has released Twitter 101 for Business - A Special Guide, a set of webpages and resources targeted for businesses that are interested in using Twitter. 
• Amazon has acquired Zappos, the online shoe store known for being customer focused and having a unique corporate culture, for 850 million USD.
• Google Friend Connect is now available in 47 additional languages. 
• Open Atrium is a new free and open source intranet platform built on Drupal, a popular open source Content Management System.
• Microsoft and Yahoo! have finally announced a search deal.

Artesia Spotlight is a monthly review of key news in the fields of social media, user communities and virtual worlds. If you want to be the first to read the news, you can subscribe to receive Artesia Spotlight by e-mail on this page.

Post Spotlight

Nick O'Neill presented his 5 Phases Of The Facebook Sales Funnel on the All Facebook blog. According to this model, Facebook marketing should be done in 5 phases: Awareness, Education, Engagement, Action and Repeat Engagement. The post also provides some examples of what strategies can be used in each of the phases.

Video Spotlight

In this short video interview Josh Bernoff, the co-author of the best selling social media marketing book Groundswell, talks about how even more common brands can use social media to connect with their customers. In another part of the interview, Bernoff also talks about the social media biggest mistake: not listening and responding. For a full transcript of the interview, see Robin Good's blog.

Post Spotlight

Marketers are always trying to use YouTube to promote their products, but only a few of them have managed to understand this new medium. The post YouTube Brands: 5 Outstanding Leaders in YouTube Marketing highlights five brands that have managed to develop a successful YouTube presence.

Other news

• A new survey among IT professionals has shown that there is a growing acceptance of social networking in the workplace.
• Web-based productivity suite Zoho now provides an add-on that allows Zoho Office to integrate with Microsoft SharePoint, allowing users to share documents between Zoho Office and SharePoint.
• Adobe has launched Acrobat.com, an online business collaboration suite similar to Google Docs.
• Google has launched the Google Apps Deployment for Enterprise site, which provides resources that help businesses move to Google Apps.
• Google has also announced Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, which allows users to use Microsoft Outlook with Google Apps.
• Microsoft has launched its new search engine Bing.
• Facebook has announced Live Stream Box, a service that will allow website owners to include live Facebook conversations next to a live streaming video event. This service was first tested during the 2009 US Presidential Inauguration.
• IBM has launched PartnerWorld Communities, a social network that will allow IBM partners to collaborate with one another.

Artesia Spotlight is a monthly review of key news in the fields of social media, user communities and virtual worlds. If you want to be the first to read the news, you can subscribe to receive Artesia Spotlight by e-mail on this page.

Post Spotlight

There are many online tools that enable us to work on a document with someone. ReadWriteWeb's The Online Collaboration Tools Guide includes some of the best online collaboration tools, which enable you to work on documents together or keep files in sync with other collaborators.

News Spotlight

A group of Australian Google engineers tried to answer the question "What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?". The result is Google Wave, a new communication and collaboration web tool, which will be released to the public later this year. Google Wave will support real-time collaboration and communication and will make use of the new HTML 5 standard. For more info, you can watch the full developer preview or read a summary of Wave features on Techcrunch.

Other news

• Business social networking site Xing now provides its users with a personalized news filtering and sharing application, and an application, which allows them to easily ask questions to the Xing community.
• Russian internet company Digital Sky Technologies has bought a 200 million USD stake in Facebook.
• CubeTree has launched an online enterprise collaboration suite, which provides employees with all essential social networking tools and an overview of what is going on in their companies through a personalized news feed.
• The New York Times has appointed its first social media editor.
• Netlog, a social networking site with over 45 million users across Europe, now integrates with Google Friend Connect.
• Google now provides more detailed Search Options, which provide tools that can help you refine your search results by date and topic.

Artesia Spotlight is a bi-weekly review of key news in the fields of social media, user communities and virtual worlds. If you want to be the first to read the news, you can subscribe to receive Artesia Spotlight by e-mail on this page.

Report Spotlight

Forrester's new report "The Future of the Social Web" defines the "five eras" of the social web, which will eventually result in "communities defining future products and services". According to the report, the eras of the Social Web are overlapping, and we've already reached the maturity phase of the first era, the era of social relationships. The report suggests that brands should start preparing for the upcoming eras of the social web today, and be ready to make some changes in the ways they distribute their content online and interact with their customers. For more details on the Five Eras of the Social Web, see this blog summary by the Forrester researcher Jeremiah Owyang.

Post Spotlight

The post "Should Your Company Have a Social Media Policy?" on the Mashable blog tries to answer the basic questions related to the implementation of a social media policy within your company. Your customers are probably already talking about your company using social media, so companies will have to internally decide about how to manage this new form of communication.

Other news

• CheckFacebook is a new website that helps you monitor Facebook growth around the world.
• Facebook has announced support for OpenID.
• IBM has launched My developerWorks, a social network for the 8 million members of developerWorks, the largest online technical resource center for software developers.
• BuddyPress, a suite of WordPress plugins and themes that adds social networking features to WordPress installations, has officially launched.

Artesia Spotlight is a bi-weekly review of key news in the fields of social media, user communities and virtual worlds. If you want to be the first to read the news, you can subscribe to receive Artesia Spotlight by e-mail on this page.

Case Study Spotlight

Best Buy, the largest consumer electronics retailer in the US, is a great example of how social technology can be used inside a company to foster an adaptable internal culture. Over 155,000 Best Buy employees have at their disposal several internal tools, which enable them to connect with their coworkers, work more efficiently, and empower them to share knowledge and innovation. For an overview of Best Buy's internal social tools, see their video The Company as Wiki.

Report Spotlight

Microsoft has released a new report about Internet usage in Europe, which estimates that "Internet consumption will outstrip traditional TV in June 2010". The report also shows that northern European countries still show a faster adoption of PCs and the Internet than southern Europe, but on the whole there are still more broadband Internet connections in Europe than in the USA. For more findings, see the full report Europe Logs On.

Virtual worlds Spotlight

According to Steve Prentice, Gartner research Fellow, we are now seeing the maturation of virtual world technologies. Prentice also believes that we are now starting to understand where virtual worlds work and where they don't. Also, the current economic situation is driving companies to evaluate virtual world technologies as a cost effective business tools. For more information, see Gartner's latest video about Virtual Worlds & The Enterprise. Perhaps that also explains why Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life, are seeing new growth in usage numbers and user transactions. 

Other news

• There are now over one million social networks on Ning, the online platform which allows people to create their own social networks. 
• Facebook is still growing at an impressive rate. It now has over 200 million active users and has just become the number 1 social networking site in Europe.
• Facebook has created a new public page called Facebook Marketing Solutions, which provides Facebook brand marketing tips and case studies.

Artesia Spotlight is a bi-weekly review of key news in the fields of social media, user communities and virtual worlds. If you want to be the first to read the news, you can subscribe to receive Artesia Spotlight by e-mail on this page.

Research Spotlight

A new University of Melbourne study has discovered that a reasonable amount of web surfing for fun at the workplace can actually increase the employees' productivity. According to the researchers, web surfing can help workers take short mental breaks, which leads them to a higher total concentration level throughout the work day. However, the researchers also note that this is only true when browsing is done in moderation and can be counter productive for people with internet addiction tendencies.

Video Spotlight

At the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Tim O'Reilly, one of the "inventors" of the term Web 2.0, delivered a short presentation about the future of the Web. In his view, the Web is getting smarter, but there is still a lot we can do to make it really smart. One of the things that will be increasingly important is the use of various sensors and connecting them to provide value. Also, O'Reilly suggested that we'll need to find ways to apply Moore's Law to world's great problems. You can also view other presentations from the Web 2.0 Expo on the official video channel.

Other news

• Google has announced Google Ventures, Google's venture capital found, which is looking to invest in "a broad range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech and health care".
• Salesforce.com, the leading provides of online CRM solutions, has integrated Twitter into its Service Cloud tool, which allows companies to keep track of customer conversations all over the web.
• ExecTweets is a new website that allows you to find and follow top business executives on Twitter. The website is sponsored by Microsoft.
• Skype is now moving into the corporate telephony market by announcing support for the SIP protocol, which is the leading voice over Internet protocol used in businesses telephony networks. This will enable companies to make cheap phone calls from their office phones to any other phone.
• YouTube has launched YouTube EDU, a page that aggregates lectures and news from over 100 US higher education institutes.