Artesia Spotlight: November 2009

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.