Left Image: This sample screenshot of the embedded community experience from the Quickbooks site.

Over the next few years, expect your friends and network of experts to be interacting with you as you use desktop software –community will be integrated within your products.

This weekend, I had a discussion with Scott Wilder at Intuit, who is one of the practice leaders when it comes to community and how it impacts business. He’s one of those leading the charge at Intuit, who has developed very large communities that thrive beyond the product itself and serve the lifestyle of the community.

Scott discussed his strategy of embedding the community features right in the software products –extending the discussion, network, and peer to peer strategy past awareness, consideration, purchase all the way to support and development. Although this is mainly a supporting objective, when brands embed community this close it’s naturally going to lead to ‘embracing’. Watch this video to learn about all five objectives: listening, talking, energizing, supporting and embracing.

[Software products will integrate your contacts in the application experience –encouraging peer learn, self-support, and community improvements]

The software product embeds the community features right into the Quickbooks, not a link, not a popup, but as part of the product experience.

Of course, more challenges lay in wait for Intuit: 1) They need to have a plan to ensure the community will understand and adopt these changes 2) Need to make it clear what the scope of this community is and what it’s not 3) Be internally prepared for what changes this brings to future product development and how it impacts support –undoubtly, customers will make product suggestions, and others will chime in.

How can this cascade to other products? Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, SAP, IBM, HP, Symantec, Electronic Arts, Hitachi, Adobe, Autodesk (Bill Johnston leaves this comment), and Apple can start to embed community into their desktop operating system and software. TV shows can start to allow users to embed community actually on the TV set (we saw an early taste of this with Current TV during the elections), and the possibilities can continue on.

Now if you have a software product and a community, forward this post on to them, and initiate an internal discussion, to find out if customers are really core to your mission, and when this would make sense to trial or even put on the roadmap.

All of this points to the larger trend how people are connecting to each other, and forming their own power bases, some companies who embrace this stand to benefit –but only if they are prepared.

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My colleague Johnathan Browne has posted on his blog (and in Japanese) that we’re organizing a blogger dinner in Tokyo when I came out in a few weeks, if you’re in the area, please spread the word. I’ll be in Tokyo speaking at some events (including Zdnet) and advising clients, and getting some time to spend in this amazing city.

Forrester Blogger’s Dinner in Tokyo
Date & Time : Wednesday, October 22nd, 19:00-21:00
Location: FUJIMAMAS
6-3-2 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
Tel: 03.5485.2283
Cost: 4,000JPY for Asian Tapas dishes and nomihodai.

Attendees: 20-25 bloggers

Agenda:
19:00-19:20 Jeremiah’s welcome speech
19:20-21:00 Q&A + free discussion

The tag blog posts, images, and tweets for the event will be #ForrTokyo

If you are interested in attending, please contact Ritsuko Tague at rtague@forrester.com / 03.5532.7684 with your name, company’s name, email address and your blog’s URL by October 3rd.

Here’s some pics from my last time in Japan, and riding the bullet train (video), I’m really excited to come back.

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I’m starting this post series (see archives) to recognize and congratulate folks who get promoted, move, or accept new exciting positions. Please help me congratulate the following folks:

Andrea Hill was recently hired as the Director of Social Media and Interactive Technology at Worldways Social Marketing. She says she actually found the position from these very job listings! (That’s really, really great)

Colin Carmichael is now the Associate Secretary for Communication and Resource Production (social media) for the Life and Mission Agency of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, and leaves the Social Media Group

SelectMinds, a community solutions provider, Names Michael M. Richardson as Chief Technology Officer, who brings has more than 25 Years of High Tech and Engineering Experience to SelectMinds Executive Team

Filiberto Selvas leaves Microsoft to join Avenue A Razorfish as Director of Strategy on Social Media (NW Region). As most know AA is part of Microsoft.

Jay Moonah (http://mediadriving.com/) was recently promoted to the position of Director of Strategy at the Toronto digital marketing agency 58Ninety Inc. His responsibilities in this position include the development of social media marketing strategy for clients such as Molson brewing, the CTV television and radio network and the Workopolis careers site.

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How to connect with others (or get a job):
Several people have been hired because of this blog post series, here’s how:

Submit an announcement
If you know folks that are moving up in the social media industry, leave a comment below, or if you’re feeling shy (it’s cool to self-nominate) send me an email. Please include a link to your announcement, and ensure you’re really living and breathing in the social media world –this is not a small aspect of your role.

Seeking Social Media Professionals?
If you’re seeking to connect with community advocates and community managers there are few resources

List of Enterprise Social Media Professionals
This list, which started with just 8 names continues to grow as folks submit to it. List of Social Computing Strategists and Community Managers for Enterprise Corporations 2008 –Social Media Professionals.

This week, I’ve run across a few jobs that would be related to this audience such as a technical community manager, or even a VP of client services for a social media company.

See Web Strategy Jobs powered by Job o Matic (Post a job there and be seen by these blog readers, fees pay for my hosting)

Digg is hiring

Connect with others in the community manager group in Facebook

Check out Jake McKee’s community portal for jobs

See Chris Heuer’s Social Media Jobs

SimplyHired aggregates job listings, as does Indeed

ForumOne Jobs for Social Media and Community

Teresa has a few jobs, some around community

New Media hire has an extensive job database

Social Media Headhunter

Social media jobs

Jobs in social media

Hiring? Leave a comment
If you’re seeking candidates in the social media industry, many of them are within arms reach, feel free to leave a link to a job description (but not the whole job description, or I’ll delete it)

I’m seeking folks that are related to full time hands on social media strategy and community managers, to be on this list, so let me know if you see these folks, and please submit them –try to include links to announcements on blogs or on the wire. Also, I probably will not include executive management changes on this list at social media companies, as the list would go on and on, but you can feel free to express yourself in the comments!

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Every few days, (or hours) you probably get a friend request of some sort, the good news is, someday, this will not be relevant.

I just got finished watching this video of Renato of “E”, a device and software platform that allows you to phsyically gesture in the real world with people you meet that you are friends. Remember palm pilot back in 2001 that let you ‘beam’ contact info to each other? Similiar to that, but now with more ’social’ context.

Thinking forward a few years, “friending people” whether in Facebook, Plaxo, or will no longer be an activity that we’ll have to do. Intelligent websites (and their data) will be able to determine who our friends are from our behaviors, context, and preferences, without us verbally (or physically) having to indicate so.

Those ‘bacn’ messages make it painfully obvious that the ’system’ (the web, data, and beyond) isn’t quite intelligent, as it can’t determine who our own social contacts are yet.

Like a baby, we’re teaching the ’system’ our language, how to walk, how to coexist in our real flesh and blood world, the ’system’ is just starting to show intelligence. One primary example of this is the use of hashtags in Twitter. We use the # sign to tag content so it’s easily to organize and find. That one # character isn’t native to our tongue (unless when you recite your grocery list and say “hashtag”) it’s another example of us speaking machine language in order to teach the system.

For example, I started a social experiment on Sunday, where I encouraged folks to tweet related music artists using the tag “#relatedmusic” you can see the database form when you search for that term –If we had enough people do this in my –and your– network we’d be able to build a reference engine that other music reccomendations services could pull from.

Saturday, I posted my thoughts about what’s next after the social web, and some interesting comments are coming in, take the time to read about it. For now, I’m tagging these posts the ‘Intelligent Web” as I don’t really think we’re there yet, we’re having to input too much to teach the machine right now.

If you can’t see where this is headed, I’ll tell you: all of what we’re doing from our clicks, queries, wall posts and tweets is teaching the ’system’. In the long run we’re creating a massive global computer, an artificial intelligence, and someday, a thinking being.

Therefore, when the ’system’ is more mature, we won’t have to explicitly state who we’re friends with anyone –it’ll have learned and already know.

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Phrases to know:
I’ll refine these over time, but for now, here’s some early stakes in the ground.

The System: The system is the combination of all websites combined, it’s a massive data base of content, clicks, search terms, time on site, shared posts, wall posts, links, and tweets.

Teaching the System: Humans are constantly speaking in machine language, from use of hashtags in twitter, or boolean searches in Google, or even from the act of friending folks in your social network. All of these behaviors are humans teaching the system how to understand us, so it can better serve us.

The Intelligent Web: Software that is able to collect and make sense of all the data in the system and is able to deliver meaningful content back to people in context –often without us saying or gesturing that we need it.

Update: This has spun off to more discussions in Friendfeed, I think a lot of folks missed the big idea I was trying to convey here –or perhaps more likely, I didn’t communicate it well.

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A graph indicating the frequency of the term “#tweetdebate”

Last night’s debate was truly an interactive experience for all. Although I setup some guidelines to score the candidates, things quickly took on a life of their own as the group formerly known as the audience assigned their own scoring –and the #tweetdebate tag was used for a variety of observations. Current TV overlayed tweets live on their TV station (see these pics of Al Gore) which I found interesting at first –then extremely distracting as the letters floating near the chins of the candidates and I eventually switched back to CNN.

The Tweetdebate game morphed and evolved to something far bigger and greater than I intended, and although the graph above shows a real spike in activity, it’s truly organic in how it was used. I think for the next three debates we can continue to use the tag, but I won’t be doing anything as formal.

We should expect to see advanced sentiment monitoring tools by the next election that will track opinions, tone, and attitudes in real time from microblogging, social networks, and whatever comes next.

The bottom line? TV is no longer a lonely experience –anyone with a cell phone or internet connection can now participate and those that listen can benefit from learning, adapting, and in some cases, appeasing.

(…and yes, if you’re not from the United States, we’re an interesting culture)

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I’m sitting in Union Square SF on a Saturday night at Starbucks getting some additional analysis completed on the Wave report, which should be publishing in a few weeks. I can’t but help think about some trends that I’ve been hearing from multiple people.

On Friday, I had a meeting with an SVP of Yahoo, to learn about some of the redesign coming to the homepage. What’s interesting is the focus is on apps, not the incredible large social graph that they’ve been building for 10 years. They know that not everyone is going to be a social participant (our technographic data indicates this also –although participation continues to increase) and everyone won’t participate on every website.

Right after lunch I talked with Scoble, who reminded me about the looming recession. we both agreed that this will shed off non-unique startups and force innovation, and likely higher CTRs for new types of marketing and advertising.

After lunch, I stopped by University Cafe in Palo Alto for an impromptu meeting, if you sit on the sidewalk table like I did, you’re almost guaranteed to see someone from the social media or tech space walk by. Facebook is just a few blocks away and many VCs, entrepreneurs take in business meetings here. Chris Saad (pic) of the data portability group came by, and he explained in depth his vision of the personal web –how content will be delivered based on historical, relevance, and not social data.

Chris showed me the upcoming Web 3.0 conference, which I tweeted “Did Web 2.0 jump the shark?” Minutes later I received a private message from Tim O’Reilly himself, we got on the phone and he explained his intentions of the term (most of us aren’t using it in the way he first envisioned) and loosely, his vision is that the behavior of networks will populate databases in which organizations can retrieve the data and deliver content –social activity isn’t always implied.

So that’s four conversations (in one day) that were outside of my usual ’social’ discussions I have with clients, entrepreneurs, press, and VCs. I’ve heard and read a lot of folks explain what they think is coming (I’m avoiding saying the “S” word), but I’m not going to accept that as fact, I’m going to continue to explore, talk to folks, interview people to understand what this trend entails.

What’s interesting is that most of my clients (large corporations) haven’t figured out how to fully embrace the social web –let alone think about what’s next. The only caveat being here is that the social web won’t go away, but will integrate, and soon a new type of technology will emerge to provide greater relevancy to content, people, activities and ideas.

When I first started this blog, I titled it the “Web Strategy Blog” not the “Social Media blog” as I know there will always be new technologies and new trends, there’s something else coming beyond the social web. As I learn more, I’ll continue to report back to you all, stay tuned.

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With your brand being mentioned so many places online, it’s a difficult task to manage how it’s positioned and where it appears –in fact, in many ways, you can’t control the brand, as it’s now ‘owned’ by those who talk about it (or always has been).

Now, if your job is to be the caretaker of your company’s brand, or you’ve been hired to do so as a PR firm, you should keep on eye on how it’s positioned on Wikipedia (and follow these rules on how to update it), if you’re in the social media space, also monitor and manage Tradevibes, Crunchbase, and now Appappeal.

With the recent concerns about brandjacking, or getting your brand punk’d, this helpful tool user name check can quickly scan the popular (and not so popular social networks to find if your company’s name (or personal) has been taken. The service sometimes goes down, so be patient with it.

On a related note, Mukund suggests here’s some targets PR folks should look at when pitching social media companies, I left a comment suggesting a few others, maybe you can help him round it out. Targeting team blogs like centernetworks, or other influentials may yield a better spend on time and effort –I’m nearly tapped out in time reviewing products.

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I’m respecting your limited time by publishing this weekly digest on the Social Networking space, which I cover as an industry analyst. By creating this digest (I started this over a year ago) it really helps me to stay on top of the space I cover.

I’ve created a new category called Digest (view archives). Start with the Web Strategy Summary, then quickly scan the succinct and categorized headlines, read text for my take, and click link to dive in for more.

Subscribe to this blog in your feedreader, or use the email subscription box in the right column.

Web Strategy Summary
Telligent, a community platform (white label social network) raises a significant 20 million from Intel Capital. The New York Times, often a powerhouse media company has adopted social features into their website. MySpace lets users create their own ads.

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Funding: Telligent raises $20mm from Intel
White label vendor Telligent raises 20 million from Intel Capital, this money can help them last the test of time past many competitors, or could spur on development and investment to take them to the next level. I’ll be watching closely, as next to Ning, this is one of the largest funds raised in this space.

Deplyoment: NYT launches social network
Yet another media company launching their social features to build community, the New York Times leads the trend, right along side Fast Company. Expect to see more deployments as companies adopt vendors like KickApps and Pluck for rapid deployment.

Advertising: MySpace lets users create their own ads
Users can now create their own ads, and these screenshots from Cnet. The interface makes it easy, much like creating your own blog theme and then launching your ads on their network.

White Paper: Trends and Best Practices via Awareness
One of the few Community Platforms to launch their own survey and then develop a report and white paper, Awareness launches their own resource center with their recent white paper.

Partnership: Lithium and Omniture
Lithium Technologies and Omniture Partner to Integrate Social Media into Web Analytics. Expect more deals to be cut over the coming months –esp after my coming event.

Launch: Widgetbox launches widget network
Harnassing a federation of bloggers, and content publishers, Widgetbox launches a network through 29 vertical channels. Much like how Technorati, Blogher, Federated Media, Glam, Gawker have done, expect this advertising network to reach to brands for vertical based marketing.

Features: KickApps expands video capabilities
“KickApps Kicks it Up Another Notch With User Controlled Video Ads” reports mashable, allowing

Mobile: Mac users connect on iPhone
Net4mac a social networking feature comes to iPhone, letting Mac users and owners connect with each other.

Usage: Facebook redesign causes dip
Is the Facebook redesign causing user rejection? USAToday things so, and this piece indicates that users may not be adopting the Facebook redesign as they might have readily hoped. Link from colleague Zach Hofer-Shall

Quirk: Facebook ‘hole’ peers into fandom
Unexpected hole in Facebook allows members to peer and see what other members are ‘fans’ of. This instance shows what Zuckerberg loves.

Culture: College recruiters scan Facebook
Many students are unaware of the impacts of their online behaviors on social networks –and how they impact getting into college, and getting jobs. We now know that college recruiters are skimming and rejecting applicants.

Culture: Facebook profiles detect Narcisicism
Individuals with lots of friends and the “myspace angle” photos could be self-centered. Quite possible, or they may be trying to build up their business network (as in my case)

If you’re a social network, or widget company, I want to know of your news, send me an email, or leave a comment below. Help me stay up to date.

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I’ll keep this short, I’m neck deep in analysis for the upcoming Wave report –while trying to balance client needs and projects, I’m busy.

When I worked at web startup in the first web boom, all kinds of people came to power that didn’t have the credentials or experience. The demand for leadership in this fast growing company resulted in immature professionals quickly moving to middle management. I remember two distinct instances where the power went to their head and I now tell their stories for all to learn:

Mr M. and the Weekly Porn Emails
Although we were in IT/Software Engineering Mr M. wasn’t from tech, and in fact, had very few technical skills, so his talent became managing one very talented technical worker. He spent most of his time causing drama, going out to lunch, and surfing and sharing porn at the office. In fact, every week, he would gather his favorite porn screenshots from playboy (I think he and his college buddies had an email list) and he would forward it to his friends. Sadly, friends and colleagues aren’t always the same, and in his mis judgement he repeatedly sent it to those under him –including me. In his wisdom, he even sent it to his subordinate, the talented tech guy. It only took a few months for this to get back to HR, and he was soon in crying his eyes out to keep his job in the VPs office while the rest of the office laughed at him for months –and still do today.

Moral of the story? Friends and colleagues aren’t always the same –respect the boundaries.

The Ego of Mr W. comes full circle
Mr W, was actually often in conflict with Mr M, they’d both moved into middle management in IT, yet by far, I’d prefer to be friends with Mr M. Now, Mr W on the other hand, through his psuedo-power around constantly telling everyone “I”m a director” and expecting us to kowtow to him with our foreheads buried to his entry of his window facing cubicle. He abused his power, taking over people’s projects –taking credit for them. I always remembered when he wanted something, he would come by and act so nice, so sweet, then BAM, here comes the Friday afternoon work request. Eventually, he used his power to intimidate the young girls, he didn’t realize it, but I was in the cube next to him when he told two female colleagues how he’d “love to get between them” and chuckle. He even made unsavory comments about my girlfriend (I had her picture on my desk), which were quite stinging. Years later, Mr W ended up working for someone that’s related to me (the valley is a very, very, small place) and IMd me and apologized for his behavior, I accepted, but will never forget.

Moral of the story? You’ve moved into power, so now act like it, and do something to improve yourself and those around you. Part 2: Be nice to everyone, you never know who will be in power.

Your turn…
Wow, that felt good. Now’s your chance to let it fly, jump on to the Jeremiah couch, and feel free to rant and rave, but two rules: 1) don’t give away the name of the offender or company name. 2) Give a moral of the story, so we can all learn. If you feel like being anonymous, I’m ok with that too.

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Sixth graders, are just 10 years from the workforce, I wonder if we’ll be ready.

I’m now in Dallas, about to speak to 250 marketers (then do workshops) who all work for a company that’s about to ramp up their social marketing activities and put community first. Brands foster communities is a trend we’re seeing, just as Oracle boldly launched it’s Oracle Mix Ideas which allows anyone to submit comments right on the corporate website.

On the flight over here from SF, I sat next to a young lady (mid 20s) who is a teacher to sixth graders (12 year olds) in San Antonio. As I almost always do, I shifted the conversation over to the internet and she shared with me how this next generation of digital natives is coming at us fast and strong

The Sixth Graders:

All of her sixth graders were literate, although not all of them had computers at home, so she couldn’t issue mandatory web assignments.

Many of them used the internet for research, she allowed them to cite wikipedia as a supplement–but they had to cite other websites.

Many students turned in their ‘papers’ as digital blog posts on blogspot.com.

The art of writing in cursive is deteriorating, many of the students could not read her cursive writing, soon it may go the way of shorthand.

The sixth graders would often groan and roll their eyes when asked to do a writing assignment –yet when she listed off the internet as one of the methods they could produce the project, they quickly got excited –and lightbulbs went off.

Plagiarism is still an issue, but she and her colleagues have sophisticated ways of checking papers by copying and pasting them in Google, or using proprietary software.

I asked her if she sees an increase in web technologies as they get older, and she says “yes, soon the parents won’t restrict and monitor their usage, as they go to high school and college”.

I asked her if this helped them to be more or less social, she replied: “Both. They still are shy in class presentations as kids are from any generation, but they express more of their personal being online”

During tests, if the students didn’t know the answer to the questions, they would write “IDK”.

Now this certainly wasn’t a scientific study, but I’m sure you can find stories like this from sixth graders all around the United States, and perhaps around the world. Give them a six years, and it’ll be interesting to see how their online behavior impacts their college admissions: “10 percent of admissions officers from prestigious schools said they had peeked at sites like Facebook and MySpace to evaluate college-bound seniors. Of those using the profiles, 38 percent said it had a “negative impact” on the applicant, according to Kaplan Inc”.

If you have experience with the modern day sixth grader, I’d love to hear your observations in the comments below, if you don’t have any stories to tell, forward this to someone who can.

Warning, if you ask me any questions, and I’m unable to respond with a good answer, I may just respond, “IDK”

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UPDATE: McCain has committed to join.

Why: Why let the media pundits and political analysts have all the fun? You can now be an armchair critic, all you need is a twitter account, a TV, and internet access.

[On the first Presidential Debate on Sept 26, 2008, YOU get to be the armchair political analyst and use Twitter to score the candidates]

What is it: With the success of the previous Twitter SuperBowl ads rating last Jan, let’s repeat this community based voting event for the upcoming presidential debates, this time, you’re in charge.

When:
9PM Eastern. September 26, 2008: Presidential debate with domestic policy focus, University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS. More details available from the commission of Presidential Debate.

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Rules:
You’re the judge! In your opinion, score points to the two candidates and tweet it

A) Score the candidates ability to debate
Using twitter, you can score the candidates with this handy scoring guide.

-3 for a personal attack
-2 for a false statement
-1 for avoiding the issue, or not answering the question
+1 for a successful assertion
+2 for a successful counterpoint to opponents assertion
+3 Quotable sound bite

B) Use Twitter to tell the world (use the hash tag)

Example: A proper tweet is: “Mccain +1 for articulating his energy policy #tweetdebate”

Example: A proper tweet is: “Obama -3 for calling McCain an old fart #tweetdebate”

Example: A proper tweet is: “Mccain +3 for great line: “It’s the economy stupid” #tweetdebate”

C) See what everyone else is saying

A good practice is to open another tab on your browser, and watch what others are saying on twitter search, tagged with the keyword #tweetdebate.

D) After the Debate, Tally your score, then leave a comment
At the end of the debate, count up your score, your twitter handle, then leave a comment on this post.
Tip: Enter your score into a spreadsheet in real time, saving you time to tally.

Example:
My twitter handle is http://twitter.com/jowyang

Obama scored a total +25 and McCain scored a total of +26

Then create a percentage: Obama scored 49% and Mccain 51%

Then soak in your glory of being a true armchair political analyst (and argue the scoring of the other twitter pundits)

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Future Debates: Come back to this site for discussions

October 2, 2008: Vice Presidential debate, Washington University, St. Louis, MO

October 7, 2008: Presidential debate in a town hall format, Belmont University, Nashville, TN

October 15, 2008:Presidential debate with foreign policy focus, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY

Despite that I work at a research firm, this event is entirely for entertainment, and some education, and won’t be used in any formal studies –have fun.

Input from Zack Reiss-Davis

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Post Event Findings:
The game started out with folks scoring as suggested above, but soon, the scoring became pretty lax, then many just used it as a way to track conversations. Current TV was showing tweets live on TV, which at one point, overwhelmed their system, resulting in no tweets showing. Twitter’s infrastructure withstood the onslought –I think they’re finally starting to see their opportunity as a major communication device.

We started out strong scoring the sound bytes and assertions, but soon the threshold to score became too difficult. I suspect folks were also interested in Current TV, The Drinking Game, the Friendfeed debate room, or just used the tweetdebate tag to track all their responses. In any case it was all good –watching any event is no longer a lonely event –we participate and mainstream media is watching and adopting.

A graph indicating the frequency of the term “#tweetdebate”

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Celebrating the hard work that companies invest in social media efforts is not only a way to feel good about our accomplishments, but also a way to learn from the successes of others.

The following list of social media awards gives agencies, brands, vendors, and consultants their chance to strut their stuff. Please leave a comment if you know of other awards.

I realize there are many awards for startups (like Demo or Techcrunch 50), but this is awards for successes that brands have done using social media

List of Social Media Marketing Awards

Forrester’s Groundswell Awards (I’m a judge)

Society for New Communications Symposium and Awards

Womma Awards

If you like this list, then you should check out my other industry indexes –lists are helpful.

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For the last few months, er years, Microsoft has been getting their assets handed to them as Apple tears into their brand with the “PC vs Mac” clever ads.

Microsoft has launched a new campaign with at least two phases, the first one showing Seinfeld and Gates acting as “normal guys” at the mall, at home, on the road. Most tech heads didn’t get it, but for the mainstream everybodies, it may have resonated. The ads may have been stalled, the reports contradict.

The second phase, which launched last night, extends the “everybody is a PC” theme shows some highly structured actors (including the lovely Eva Longoria) showing how they’re a PC.

I figured out that the theme was “everyone is a PC” which is a differentiator from the elite feeling of Mac for young urban 20 something year olds, to the rest of the business and work world.

So what could Microsoft (And their agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky) do to resonate and win this campaign? Allow anyone to publish their photos, videos how they are a PC. They currently have these features in their campaign site, (link via Andrew Finkle) but they are buried a few clicks away, and they even require a fan to submit their age.

What should Microsoft do?

Create YouTube Video Templates that have the same video start and end (called bumpers) and have a seperate MP3 track that can be added in the background

Create a set of tags “ImaPC” or “PCpride” or “everyonePC” that makes the videos easy to find

Next, aggregate the videos onto one page, making them easy for folks to find.

Create a voting campaign allowing users to add points to the videos they enjoy the most

Use these user created videos in actual TV and web advertising

Allow negative videos to be included, and showcase these on the web

Elevate these social features right on the campaign page, expand to Facebook, LinkedIn, and where else creators and joiners exist.

To take the win, Microsoft should let the people lead, create, and own the campaign, Jerry and Bill can share the spotlight, reframe the campaign on creators. I see there site is hinting at this, and it maybe in their plans, but I’d expect them to crank this user created feature up.

If you agree that Microsoft should elevate the opportunity for everyone to show how they are a PC, leave comment below, maybe, just maybe, they’re watching.

Update: Microsoft is putting the ads on Times Square in NYC, a good start –but don’t forget to republish across the web. (link via Paisano)

Update 2: Dennis McDonald did a “Worldle” analysis (Tag cloud) of all the words used in the following comments. What’s being screamed? “Campaign, people, PC, microsoft, pc, mac”

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There’s a whole ‘nother hidden layer of information that never hits the blogosphere or twittersphere: gag orders, quiet deals, or the sucking sound of credit stealing brand managers.

One of the benefits of being an analyst is get opportunity to talk to folks behind closed doors –I hear that ‘nother hidden layer of information. I get to hear the secrets, learn about who’s shaking who’s hand and who’s in competition with who.

There’s always a story behind the story. What does that mean? When you see successful projects touted by large brands, there are almost always unseen vendors that are helping behind the scenes. In many cases, the brands want to take the credit for the successes, and when things don’t work out, sometimes the vendors get the shaft.

Who are some of the unsung heroes you may never hear about? technology vendors, PR firms, agencies, and even VCs.

Recently some PR pros told me the ideas they gave clients were rejected for months or even years, and eventually when they were implemented, it was somehow forgotten the ideas came from them. Or take technology vendors, I know who’s running some very high profile communities, but the vendor has a gag order not to tout their connection. Agencies: digital, brand, interactive, often do the heavy lifting for marketing campaigns, yet brand managers who sign the checks often get the credit. Or lastly, VCs connect, influence, and encourage deals to happen that you will never hear about –perhaps by design.

While maybe this is the cost of doing business (putting your client first and foremost) next time you see success or a failure from a large well known brand, always realize there’s an untold back story that doesn’t hit the press, and rarely hits the blogs.

Here’s a quiet 21 un-gun salute to those unsung heroes, shhhhh.

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I’m respecting your limited time by publishing this weekly digest on the Social Networking space, which I cover as an Industry Analyst –a good way to get in my head.

I’ve created a new category called Digest (view archives). Start with the Web Strategy Summary, then quickly scan the succinct and categorized headlines, read text for my take, and click link to dive in for more.

Subscribe to this blog in your feedreader, or use the email subscription box in the right column.

Web Strategy Summary
A smattering of deals, deployments, features and a few acquisitions continue to make this a pretty standard week in the social networking space: typical fast moving space that makes it very hard for anyone (even me) to track. Do note that Gigya’s “Socialize” will help the spread of the social graph, extending not just widgets –but access to friends– even further.

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Features: Gigya launches “Socialize”–like Friend Connect
This allows social graph data to move between different containers and websites, learn more about Gigya’s socialize here.

Deplolyment: WSJ launches social network features
Amid criticism for making the community behind closed doors, commenters suggest the new site design to be ‘emo’ and brooding. As more media companies embrace social media content, does this indicate mainstream adoption?

Employment: Is your online profile professional looking?
Dangers of Social Networking, make sure your online profile and reputation is cleaned for your current and future employer. (link via Mike Street)

Advertising: LinkedIn launches Ad Network
In yet another way to monetize, this profitable social network (an oxymoron?) is now deploying it’s own advertising network. I’ve seen these slides before, and was surprised to see Techcrunch published them.

Deal: MySpace music extends labels reach
In theory this sounds like a great match between popular media centric social network MySpace and media labels. With the ability to stream content and share with each other, is this enough to deter users from stripping content and sharing on p2p networks?

Deployment: MTV launches online community
This real time community supports shows, provides additional content, and allows another outlet for users to watch –and engage with each other around media shows.

Showcase: Brand new social networks emerge
A handful of vertical social networks were featured at the recent Techcrunch 50 event.

Acquisition: The Social Gaming Network swallows Fluff Friends
A virtual pet game and community, “Fluff Friends” has been acquired by the Social Gaming Network (SGN) I visited them a few months ago in their small but growing Palo Alto office

Features: MySpace embraces user uploaded video
MySpaceTV announces direct video upload, allowing users to upload video directly from their hard drive or even from webcams. Why? This increases user interaction and media engagement. Could be a win considering the heavy self-expression found in the site.

Partnership: Bebo and ESPN
Bebo’s open media platform allows ESPN’s short form content to be available in their media savvy social network. Programming includes clips from highlights, and sportcenter content.

Deployment: Vehix utilizes Pluck
The Vehix site now integrates Pluck’s “Energizing” features to allow the site to grow social wings –letting members share, comment, and interact with each other.

Investment: IBM grows Cambridge facility, focuses on Social Networks
Expect to see more investments in Lotus, as IBM starts to assemble more social networking software features for their enterprise products. Competitors will likely follow suit, and put more blips on the future roadmaps for enterprise social networking features. (Updated)

PR professionals that have clients in this space, should subscribe to this blog, and ensure their clients are put on this digest by sending me an email, or better yet, leave a comment. If you work for a white label community platform, keep me updated, I want to know of your wins.

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Click play on the above video, and wait till the end to see the interactive choices.

With the founder of YouTube Chad Hurley declaring that 13 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds, it’s hard to the growth trends.

Although just a hyperlink on a flash player, YouTube trials this first Interactive Riddle which let’s users choose answers at the end. For interactive marketers, this can lead to new forms of interactions such as quizzes, exploratory product demos, choose your own adventure, virtual world tours, and increased brand engagement. It’ll be interesting to see how video bloggers start to adopt this interactive narrations, or how perhaps how in the future dynamic links can be inserted right on the video to those that may want to add their own responses to existing videos.

(link via Genieclo)

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LiveWorld now introduces “LiveBar” and Mark Hendrickson from Techcrunch has a review showing now any static website that embeds this lightweight social script.

I first saw mockups of this product a few months ago from LiveWorld, and it seemed impressive, but unlike embedding chat, comments, forums, or blogs directly into the webpage, this is an ‘overlay’ that is quietly positioned at the bottom of any webpage.

What use cases could warrant this overlay experience versus an embed? Existing large websites with an inflexible CMS system that makes UI changes difficult. Companies that want to experiment with social on their websites but aren’t ready to dive in. Lastly, websites with heavy interactive marketing or content where community should take a back seat to what’s being shown. Expect to see competitors of Liveworld to develop their own versions of Livebar, allowing lightweight deployments of community features. Also, expect this to be a great ’sampler product’ for LiveWorld to demonstrate community to hesitant brands –much like the easy to deploy OpinionLab tools.

Looking forward, whether companies like it or not, the future holds that websites will be social, and it means that customer opinions (good and bad) will circumvent their marketing content. The LiveWorld folks also have launched a community site, where you can interact with them further.

I’m conducting a Wave report on this community platform, and it’s become very clear to me that the technology is a commodity (that’s why there are around 100 vendors) and what really is going to count is strategy, service, support, and knowhow.

Related Resources

Status Update 2: The Forrseter Wave Report

What Facebook Connect means to brands

Thinking Long Term: Google’s New Browser ‘Chrome’

Forrester Report: Online Community Best Practices

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Left: Scale Venture Partners brought VPs of Marketing, CMOs and founders portfolio clients to meet with me last week.

When we think of influencer groups in the social media space, we often think of top bloggers like Techcrunch, RWW, GigaOm, Fast Company, Cnet, yet there’s a whole ‘nother influence group that rarely gets ink –I’m starting to spend more time with them as it helps me to better understand the space.

An inconspicuous influencer group . The last seven business days have been intensive full day sessions with vendors for my upcoming Forrester Wave research on community platforms. I’m always energized by the fire in the eyes and the passion that comes through when talking to founders and entrepreneurs. Sadly, a problem for entrepreneurs is that they often get tunnel-vision and forget to look up outside of the lab at the greater market, fortunately, they should have VCs (who often sit on their board) that help them to see further, connect deals, and provide guidance.

The interesting thing about VCs is how incredibly powerful they are in our space. Compared to the excessive noise in our industry, tou don’t hear too much out of the mouths of VCs, but believe me they are extremely powerful. Aside from the obvious power from control of funding for investments, they can influence the direction of their portfolio companies, and foster relationships between different companies. VCs influence the sellers, in my market, these are the startups.

On the other hand, industry analysts, while do have some influence over startups, have an even stronger relationships with the buyers, (and media) in this case is the the Fortune 5000 companies that seek help to make decisions on how to organize their company, staff, budget and deploy social computing.

VCs and Analysts are on a quest to answer the same questions
Despite these different takes on the same market, VCs and industry analysts are answering the same questions: 1) What’s going to matter in the future? 2) Who’s going to do it? In fact, while the methodology differs slightly, both analysts and VCs are conducting research, taking in pitches and briefs, and finding out what others think of companies before they fund or recommend them.

Given the similiar goals, last week, my long term friend Jennifer Jones, a marketing expert who is known for her work with VCs such as Mayfield, Versant Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Levensohn is my go to guide to meeting these folks. In fact she helped coordinate a dinner between myself and Scale Venture Partners with a handful of their web portfolio companies (VPs, CMOs, CEOs and founders) and potential investments. So what did we talk about?

Over dinner we discussed that:

We all see the same direction of the social web, the social graph is going to separate and be available from many different websites.
Micromedia tools are powerful for support and marketing, but monetization is still a mystery.

Jokingly, Microsoft and Yahoo aren’t known for innovation and flexibility, yet we are in awe with Google, Apple, and Facebook.
There are too many players in the space due to commodity technology, the need for segmentation and stratifcation is needed.

Funding for social media in the marketing space slowly grows as it gets pulled from other traditional marketing channels, many are looking at where other buckets of money can come from within the enterprise in IT, HR, and maybe even Sales.

There’s a need to bring the varying vendors together for roundtables to discuss how data will be shared from site to site as the entire web becomes more social.

Analyst/VC dinners
As you can tell, we all learned alot from this trifecta of entrepreneurs, VCs and industry analysts; it was healthy to bring forward a larger part of the ecosystem to share with each other. VCs also want to demonstrate to their investments and investors that they’re highly connected, influential, and have a broad set of connections. Jennifer is setting up some future VC/Entrepreneur/Analyst dinners, if you’re a VC firm and want to participate, I recommend you contact her, as I’ll be spending more time with this powerful influence group as I move forward, it gives me a greater viewpoint to how the market is shaping for my research as well as providing portfolios with access to brief analysts on what they’re working on.

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I’m starting this post series (see archives) to recognize and congratulate folks who get promoted, move, or accept new exciting positions. Please help me congratulate the following folks:

Chris Kieff got his job using social media tools and tells all in this interview (audio). He’s now the Director of Marketing with Ripple6, congrats Chris, great story.

Dave Delaney (who has an interesting blog) is now a Social Media Coordinator, for Griffin Technology.

Susan Koutalakis, is now Mzinga’s Public Relations Manager, she emailed me about this change, and I called her up within a few minutes to introduce myself and offer her congrats, I know many of her colleagues, she’s in good company.

Clinton Schaff leaves M80 and now ships off to Houston to take on the role as Senior Director, Marketing & Communications, Mouth Watering Media LLC

Congrats to Nicole Vanderbilt to the newly-created position of Head of International Expansion at popular social network Bebo, where she will be responsible for driving Bebo’s business and membership in key international markets, focusing on France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. She previously worked as Google’s Head of Industry Marketing in Europe and India, responsible for building the b-to-b marketing and industry sales strategies.

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How to connect with others (or get a job):
Several people have been hired because of this blog post series, here’s how:

Submit an announcement
If you know folks that are moving up in the social media industry, leave a comment below, or if you’re feeling shy (it’s cool to self-nominate) send me an email. Please include a link to your announcement, and ensure you’re really living and breathing in the social media world –this is not a small aspect of your role.

Seeking Social Media Professionals?
If you’re seeking to connect with community advocates and community managers there are few resources

List of Enterprise Social Media Professionals
This list, which started with just 8 names continues to grow as folks submit to it. List of Social Computing Strategists and Community Managers for Enterprise Corporations 2008 –Social Media Professionals.

This week, I’ve run across a few jobs that would be related to this audience such as a technical community manager, or even a VP of client services for a social media company.

See Web Strategy Jobs powered by Job o Matic (Post a job there and be seen by these blog readers, fees pay for my hosting)

Connect with others in the community manager group in Facebook

Check out Jake McKee’s community portal for jobs

See Chris Heuer’s Social Media Jobs

SimplyHired aggregates job listings, as does Indeed

ForumOne Jobs for Social Media and Community

Teresa has a few jobs, some around community

New Media hire has an extensive job database

Social Media Headhunter

Social media jobs

Jobs in social media

Social Media HeadHunter

Hiring? Leave a comment
If you’re seeking candidates in the social media industry, many of them are within arms reach, feel free to leave a link to a job description (but not the whole job description, or I’ll delete it)

I’m seeking folks that are related to full time hands on social media strategy and community managers, to be on this list, so let me know if you see these folks, and please submit them –try to include links to announcements on blogs or on the wire. Also, I probably will not include executive management changes on this list at social media companies, as the list would go on and on, but you can feel free to express yourself in the comments!

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As of yesterday, Gartner analysts are now able to blog about topics related to their industry, judging by their posts, this looks like an internal battle they were finally able to win, fantastic news. In light of their upcoming Web Innovation Summit (see the official blog), there is a great deal of focus on social media, the cloud and web 2.0. For many IP companies, making decisions on whether to join the company always requires some degree of uncomfort and a whole lot of trust.

While Gartner has official corporate blogs (as most analyst firms do) the following list of Gartner blogs appear to be personal blogs maintained by individual analysts, I’m great at lists, so here’s a start.

Mark Driver, focus on large scale distributed computing and web technologies.

Ray Valdes, Vice President, Engineering, 2 years, his research on social software is interesting to me.

Gene Phifer: Managing VP of Web Technologies Group

Jeff Mann: As VP of Research, Jeff has a personal blog, but discusses analyst related duties from his Twitter account. Aside from being interesting, he’s been a real gentleman towards me.

What’s interesting in Gene’s comments is that he writes the following: “Thanks to all for the welcome aboard. Several of us have been chomping at the bit to get out into the blogosphere. Stay tuned–the last I heard about 50 Gartner analysts will be joining me”.

As a friendly tip to these new bloggers, I always reccomend to my clients to use Feedburner in order to track growth of subscribers –a great way to measure the ROI of your efforts, but it’s important to do it now from the start, to accurately benchmark growth.

I believe in being a gentleman in business and want to lead community, not break it –it always seems better to respect competitors, and to get energized when they do something interesting. When we’ve smart people from multiple areas of the industry sharing online and talking, the hope is that new information can be shared, confirmation of existing premises, or new ideas can start to form, or at least that’s my answer to Carter’s question. Please take the time to welcome Gartner’s analysts to the conversation, I look forward to being in dialog with them.

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