The Web Strategist deals with many internal customers
A Web Strategist is an web decision maker, in context of this blog, they are often within large corporations. They have internal customers that range from marketing, product teams, product marketing, support, PR, advertising, IT, and a plethora of external vendors. For many web strategists’ much of your effort won’t be dealing with users or your web team of developers and designers but with internal stakeholders. I’ve seen a lot of this when I was corporate web manager, and I’d guess that over 50% of my time was spent dealing with requests, problems, prioritization of internal stakeholders. (I managed an enterprise intranet, extranet, and aligned a disparate enterprise intranet)

Your internal customer: the stakeholder
What’s a stakeholder? someone who stands to benefit or lose from your direct actions, as a result, they are your internal customers. Stakeholders can make your life heaven or hell, from their requests, or to they way they give feedback to your management chain.

Think of yourself as a chaperone
The way to manage stakeholders is to think of yourself as a chaperone, for your stakeholders, you oversee them, guide them, and direct them where they need to go. This is somewhat of a challenge, as if you’re overbearing and deny them their requests, they’ll escalate to their management (their parents), who will talk to your management (your parents), causing unnecessary headache. It can go the other way as well, if you bend to their will, they will dominate your time, and the user experience (your external customers) of the site could suffer if your put business needs first –rather than balancing the user with business needs.

How to Deal with Internal Stakeholders:

Develop great relations with your internal stakeholders
Make yourself accessible to these teams, and build relationships to understand their business needs and drivers and try to get ahead of their requests, learn to ancipate their needs.

Establish clear roles
Sadly, stakeholders will often grab the first person in the web team they see to make a request, either a small web update or a project with scope creep. Assign someone on your team to facilitate requests, and a role to properly scope projects so you’re always setting expectations.

Make the process very clear
Tasks, Projects and Programs all have different life cycles, roles, processes and requirements, you’ll need to spell out very clearly to your stakeholders how each of those are different, and set expectations.

Develop a ticketing and project system
Deploy a system that will both accept incoming requests, this will help free up team resources, help see all the requests from one view, and help to keep track of many requests. This system will eventually be a great way to report to your management team of your fulfillment, and great for customer satisfaction reporting. Thanks to Adam for the submission in the comments.

Lead the prioritization, but involve stakeholders
You’re always going to have more requests than resources, unless of course your company is headed the wrong way. Make it clear what your current resource threshold is and prioritize projects. As new requests come in, you can have stakeholders work with you to move budgeted resources around –forcing them to prioritize their own requests. Of course, you’ve the final say, and should be empowered by your management to lead this forward with conviction

Train stakeholders
Depending on how your website is setup, some of your stakeholders may be encouraged to publish directly to the website, you’ll need to educate them on how to use tools, analytics, and other know hows to be successful. Train stakeholders on how to understand web analytics and web reports –empower them to take ownership over the content they have on their site. Teach them to fill out a requirements and scoping document, saving your team time and ensuring they’ve fully thought out the request.

Make your schedule and reports available
Let all stakeholders know of what your team is working on, establish an internal calendar with project definitions available, including web analytics reports so business stakeholders can work with them

I could go on and on with other recommendations for success, but instead, I encourage you to leave nuggets in the comments. I’ll add great ones to this list and fully credit you.

Related Resources

The many Web Strategy Constituents: The external forces that shape your website

The Three Web Activities: Task, Project, and Business Programs

A Complete List of the Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008

Video: Alastair Duncan on Corporate Website Leadership (3:30)

10 comments

As an analyst, I watch the online community space very closely, and am always interested in seeing how traditional institutions and organizations approach, adapt, succeed or fail in adopting social tools.

Fast Company, a forward thinking business publication has revamped it’s corporate website to now be an online community. Their initial three page announcement written by Edward Sussman: “The Media is Social”

[Fast Company, a traditional publication, has featured community as it’s primary focus. But success isn’t guaranteed as: innovating without a clear objective is dangerous, the bottom-up approach must cascade to the whole organization, and they must rapidly make course corrections]

Opportunity
Fast Company is the first, but certainly not last, mainstream publication to integrate the majority of their site as a social community. The starting page of their website isn’t the magazine, or it’s articles, but is the community site. Traditional media is under fire from social media, the power has shifted to the participants, so in return Fast Company is participating: hiring bloggers and video bloggers (Robert Scoble and Shel Israel) and are integrating within their site. In many other cases, websites have bolted on social forums around content, this is clearly a full replacement of community over Fast Company content.

Objectives
Fast Company is attempting to involve readers and the market to be involved in creating content. We’ve listed out there are five major social computing objectives, (listening, talking, energizing, supporting, embracing) and this one could fall under embracing, where customers and employees collaborate to build next generation products and services.

Challenges
Once the initial buzz wears off, we’ll have to see who will remain leading the and joining in the conversations. Will the lines between professional created editorial and community continue to be blurred? How will high quality content be elevated so usefulness is found? Most importantly, with the many reports showing that advertising on social networks is ineffective, how will Fast Company monetize?

What they deployed
Fast Company deployed a community platform using Drupal, and hired experts to implement, it contains a variety of features from profile building, forums, user created blogs, media rooms, event calendars, and many other features. They have made this the primary experience from the homepage of Fast Company, and have a control navigation bar at the top of each page.

---

Initial Analysis of the Community, Fast Company should:

Determine a Goal
Being creative for the sake of innovation isn’t enough. It’s great to see that they are trying something new, but what is the end goal? How will they measure results? Does the team know what success looks like?

Quickly Squash Bugs
I noticed a few hiccups that aren’t uncommon on a launch. 1) Site error: the site was not available for some time, Chris Brogan has screenshots 2) I tried to message Edward, but it got stuck in an endless loop of clicks to add him as a contact before messaging him, confusing. While all excusable the first week, this needs to quickly be resolved.

Focus on fewer features
The community site launched with too many features, as a result, the initial interface is overwhelming. I encourage clients to launch with only three major features, (such as a profile, forum, blog, media, q&a, etc), unfortunately, Fast Company launched without all of those

Elevate Fast Company Editorial
The professionally created content that we seek from Fast Company is hidden, which is too bad, as that’s why we come to them in the first place. There’s currently a saturation of online communities on every given subject on Ning, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo and Google groups. How is this different? I think the order is backwards: Lead with the editorial, attach the social features second, the social features should orbit (in context) the articles.

Clean up the Interface
The interface is crowded and unclear, resembling enterprise software, there are too many options and tools. I’m not the only one, I received feedback from some of my 3000 followers in twitter: “@jowyang I agree, the site was bewildering at first” The deployment looks like the features were determined by the developers and not a user experience designer. Let tools be hidden, and show more on a mouse over or let them cascade out. It’s confusing to understand what the top categories are compared to the control bar, then the many features on every page. Think Zen: articles first, social second, features and tools third.

Start with a tour
Develop a quick and dirty walk through video or animation that highlights how the website will serve the users, and how they can be involved and contribute. Highlight at the lead in video, and have your top bloggers post quickly.

Make community a core ethos of company
Being first has it’s advangtes, you get the buzz, but there’s also disadvantages: the path has not been cleared before, and innovators must quickly course correct when mistakes happen. Editors, writers, journalists, management and support must all be involved in the community, taking input, talking, and discussing. For success, Fast Company will need to involve a social way of thinking in everything they do, this can’t simply be a flash or wine thrown in the pan by management.

---

The Big Picture:

Can a business publication blend journalism and online community to create something better than either by itself? This is the ‘fast’ question posed in the community, and there were a myriad of responses, most positive. My response was the following:

“Yes it can, and it can also learn more from it’s audience, fuel research, ideas, and stories. The successful business will learn how to get the community to be part of the content creation, and how to monetize on top of this.”

The Future
Expect this to be a success for Fast Company, but they’ll need to act on the previous recommendations. Expect other business publications to quickly launch similar communities, and soon the industry will be inundated with ‘me toos’. The savvy publications will still realize that the web is distributed and won’t limit their community efforts to their corporate domains, but will also spread to where the people are. The savvy fishermen, fish where the fish are.

Conclusions: Being innovative doesn’t guarantee success
Fast Company has launched an innovative community site, unseen by most mainstream publications. When the shinyness wears off, the company will need to involve community in every aspect of it’s strategy for it to thrive. This is certainly a website and community to watch, I’ll post additional analysis in a few months, and hope to get some numbers from the team.

28 comments

A Widget Case Study
Yesterday, I gave a teleconference on Facebook as a ready-made marketing program. I gave a few examples of success, and the audience was hungry for success metrics and numbers. One of the case examples was about rebranding an application/widget in this case, Rock You’s vampire application.

Sony rebrands popular Vampires Widget with 30 Days Night, upcoming Vampire movie
Vampires, which you may already know as the RPG where members bite each other to receive points (and duel) was already popular with over 3 million installs in Facebook.

Sony pictures, the parent company of the very scary 30 Days Night vampire horror film rebranded the existing application, and launched a sweepstakes contest to generate registrations and glean intelligence. The grand prizes? 4 wheel ATVs and $1500.

Specifically, they placed banner ads on the rebranded vampire applications which promoted the movie (one could assume that those who opt-in for the vampires application would also like a vampire movie) promoting the sweekstakes.

The measurable results?
The campaign was only live for 3 weeks, and there were 59,100 sweepstakes entries. (success was deemed at 10k, this clearly moved beyond that)
The visits (I don’t know if they were unique or repeated) were 11,642,051 for the bite page, and 17,652,567 for the stats page (I believe these are part of the interactive experience of the game.
Sony was happy, it exceeded expectations, and users of the application weren’t over branded.

RockYou asked me to keep the price confidential, but based upon the results they told me, I suggested they double the rates, this is despite what Mashable reports on.

What worked?

Fishing where the fish are: Sony figured out where the already existing community was (remember to fish where the fish are) and rather than trying to rebuild something completely by scratch, they leveraged an existing successful application.

Rely on specialists for new arenas: In my many briefings with vendors and clients, specialized firms often provide something a general interactive firm or corporate web marketing team can’t. They have experience, know their area, and in this case, they knew to rely on someone that already knew Facebook.

Compliment the existing user experience: Sony didn’t beat the 3 million existing users with heavy advertising (and I’m sure RockYou wouldn’t have let them) over the head, instead offered value by giving away prizes, and tied in a movie that already existed.

What could have been better?
In my opinion, it would be great if:

The campaign lasted longer than 3 weeks.

Rather than simply embedded, Sony could sponsor elements from the movie and integrate within the game. (vampires could fight at different scenes from the movie, key characters from the movie could become non-player characters, etc). They already have a multi-player game that could have tied in.

A spin off game could have emerged just around the game, where members could give virtual gifts to each relating to the movie, then cross-selling other sony products and merchandise.

Also realize there are very few applications in Facebook that are this popular, don’t expect these type of results to occur every time.

Widget Network Developers
Looking bigger, RockYou isn’t the only vendor doing this type of work, also see Slide, Clearspring, Gigya, and a bunch of others. If you’re in the space, feel free to leave a comment below adding to the conversation.

For those Forrester clients who attended the webinar, I hope that clears up the question (as I promised to find the answer), and thanks to Ro Choy and team of Rock You for the details. If you need to know more, read this weekly digest of the social network industry, or see all posts tagged Facebook.

34 comments

Update: Several have suggested that this announcement is nothing new, (See initial announcement in 2006) and upon further investigation (and a quick email exchange with the Facebook team) confirms this to be right. What’s new is that it’s now easier to do than before. Regardless, the awareness of this feature is low within the marketplace, and everything I write in the following still stands true. Consider this awareness raising, and more of these types of distributed web tactics to continue in 2008.

---

My goal is to simply tech speak and boil it down to what it means for you, a web strategist. I’ll update this post as I learn more information.

What Facebook wrote
In their most recent announcement they gave a very technical explanation regarding the announcement:

“This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications. Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported. The exceptions are:”

Web Strategists’ Translation
This means that web owners can now embed existing Facebook applications easier than before. Now, in addition to being able to create an application/widget that will sit on Facebook alone, you can now easily embed it on your own website (in addition to leveraging the social features that Facebook offers).

[You can start to bring the Facebook community to your own corporate website, rather than directly developing on Facebook alone. This is a step towards the community now leaving the social network and moving to other locations]

This is really making the social features and widgets of Facebook portable. This is important as your web strategy is now distributed in many locations. For corporate web strategists, you’ll need to expand the scope of your plan to include how some of these widgets and applications could be embedded on your own microsites and corporate websites. This also means this is a ‘bridge’ to get active Facebook users closer to your corporate website.

Impacts to Google’s Open Social
If you’re not familiar, I’ve outlined what Open Social Means to your executives, read this first. Essentially, Google and it’s many partners wants to make it easy for widgets to move from one social network to another with little re-coding: portable and re-usable widgets. Unfortuantly, this has yet to be seen, and Facebook’s announcement allows widgets to be more portable, somewhat creeping in on Open Social’s intentions. In the long run, expect all of these companies to be working together, sharing API data, as those that don’t will be left out.

What you need to do:

Action: Do nothing at this point, let’s wait to see some case studies of how this is being implemented.

Plan: This doesn’t keep you from correctly planning, so continue to make your web strategy a distributed one, where content, applications, and people move from social network to social network, and to your own corporate website. Talk with your interactive agency, web developers, and social media gurus on what some of these possibilities could mean. Have weekly 30 minute brainstorming parties and see how this could be implemented and integrated within your current activities.

How to think of this: Plan on adding social features to your own corporate website so that visitors will interact with your own content, re-sort it, edit it, and mash it however they want. The future of content is amorphous and ubiquitous. (I’ve been saying this since 2005 and now we’re finally starting to see it happen)

21 comments

Why Web Strategists should consider widgets
Expect widgets to act like a network, the span over many different containers like social networks, websites, and blogs. Since widgets are opt-in by the publisher or social network member, it’s a great way to track who’s actually interested in the content. As a result, the opportunity for more sophisticated marketing and advertising moves from carpet bombing to opt-in nearly GPS radar-like accuracy.

First, understand the distributed web strategy
Need to get up to speed on this, start with my primer on web marketing is distributed, not on two domains alone, followed up by a former CMOs perspective on the distributed web. Getting users to come to your corporate website is not the only goal, savvy fisherman fish where the fish are.

New players as widget networks emerge
I’m closely watching the widget industry with colleague Charlene Li. This time last year, there were no widgets in Facebook, and now there are over 13,000. I recognize that this is a growth market Widget ad revenue was estimated at about $20 million in 2007, or about one-thousandth of Internet advertising as a whole. According to the new comScore data for November, Slide claimed almost 144 million unique viewers, for a 16% market share, and RockYou claimed a 11.7% share, with 104 million individual viewers. In July, Slide had 130 million individual users, or a 15% share, while RockYou boasted 96 million users, or 11.1% of the total. (stats via MSNBC)

Spending low, but expect growth
According to the data (from Comscore) that 6% of internet advertising dollars were being spent on social networks, and only a fraction currently is spent on widgets. Expect that to grow in both camps. Widget networks aren’t limited to social networks alone, in many cases, they can be repurposed for mobile devices as well as standalone embeds on websites and blogs.

Measurement key as dollars shift
The article states that some of the growth is capped due to lack of measurement (a good reason why I created this list of widget measurement companies). You’ll need to measure to show success, as well as make in-flight course corrections in near real time.

Expectations in 2008
So, expect widget networks like Slide, Rockyou, Widgetbox, Watercooler, and many many others, to become like syndicated networks, offer self-serve advertising, begin to offer metrics, and offer unique co-branded, and co-sponsored marketing campaigns to brands. Two of these networks will likely be acquired by large media or internet companies in the next 11 months.

Case Study: Forbes Widgets
Here’s a case of a company letting go to the distributed web, I just ran into the Forbes site, and saw they had a full page devoted to widgets, that let it’s content, and brand spread of it’s site. Interesting that it’s sponsor, in this case Visa, goes with it.

What you should do
First, determine if your community and marketplace is using widgets, do research. If so, seek one of those widget networks, and trail an advertising campaign that will match to your right community. Don’t try to recreate a widget, leave it to the experts, and likely, your interactive firm won’t do it well, these are very specialized products. Rather than have the widget network vendor recreate a new widget, leverage an existing one by sponsorship, rebranding, or integrating with a unique marketing campaign.

13 comments

Lately, I’ve been hearing from more startups that they want to get into the enterprise space. These consumer focused web startups are the ones we know and love with the clever non-sensical names, rounded corners, and domains missing the “e”.

For many startups, having enterprise customers is a great proposition, as it gives the opportunity for repeat revenue from a stable source, partnership opportunities, and maybe even chances for acquisition.

[While many startups are interested to offer their services to Enterprise companies, they underestimate the complexity. There are many overlooked requirements from culture to support that startups just don’t get]

Sadly, while we love these tools on the free open web for our personal uses, many of them aren’t ready for a smooth transition into an enterprise web teams and by serious business folks and executives. A new set of rigorous feature requirements need to be met, including disposing of the ‘fun brand’ and getting ready to support demanding corporate clients.

10 Considerations for the Startup planning to offer to the Enterprise

1) Most importantly, find a business opportunity or pain that you plan on fixing.

2) Re skinning: In many cases, offer a white label tool so it can be rebranded by the consumer.

3) Offer an ASP version as business units will want to adopt without the IT department. (Update: ASP as in Application Service Provider, so a web-version hosted on your servers, so they customer doesn’t have to download any software, or have to rely on IT to do this. Typepad, SalesForce, and SurveyMonkey are examples of this)

4) Later, evaluated offering a software version that IT and Engineering can download and use on internal or secured severs behind the firewall,

5) Build a robust system that won’t fail from heavy enterprise use, sadly, Twitter would never make it.

6) Develop login and permission systems that work with a variety of identity systems, ensure data can be easily transferred to clients, use industry standards.

7) Provide a healthy dashboard and metrics for the clients administrative team

8 ) Hire sales and account teams that have backgrounds in corporate. For initial sales with a business unit, expect to sail through, but expect rigorous testing, negotiations, and detailed contracts when dealing with corporate purchasing departments.

9) On demand support: Dealing with enterprise clients requires a higher degree of support, expect to jump, leap, and spring into action at the request of your corporate clients.

10) Get serious: consider rebranding and refocusing the tool. Refine or create a separate marketing effort to aim for the enterprise space, consider creating a sub-brand.

While it’s sure attractive for startups to want to offer their products to corporations, many have not thought through the implications and requirements to be enterprise class. Quite frankly, many won’t have the aptitude, resources, or time to do this right.

[Many startups will offer to the enterprise, but most will fail. Successful startups offering to the enterprise need to have maturity, and it’s not something that can be masked]

If I’ve missed any considerations, please extend the list, by leaving a comment or sharing from your own blog

A special note about terms: While it would have been so easy for me to use the term Enterprise 2.0 I used every precaution to actually describe and explain the concepts rather than just using that term. I hope that you too become mindful before using that term, as well as Web 2.0. Show your mastery: focus on descriptions and outcomes rather than buzzwords.

17 comments

This is an updated revision of the 2007 version, which was one of the top viewed posts for the entire year. I’ve added quite a few new forms as they’ve emerged or come to maturity over this last year.

Summary and Audience
This document catalogs the many tools and tactics available for corporate web strategy in 2008. Even if your strategy or resource limitations restrict you from entering all spaces, awareness of the changes in our digital landscape are critical. This document is intended for decision makers roles such as CMO/VP/Director of Web and Marketing.

Changes in communication require corporations to adapt and evolve
In North America the web medium in the number one medium in the workplace and second at home, a significant portion of your resources should be developed around your online programs, research indicates the web medium will continue to grow. We also know that prospects in a variety of stages in the buying stage use the web to make decisions, this is an arena no company can afford to ignore. Most importantly, future generations are native to the web, and this will only increase over time.

Limitations
This is not a substitute for a plan or strategy, this is simply an index of tools. This list is not prioritized, nor should it be considered formal analysis, A strategist should first identify objectives, develop a plan only then choosing tools, and in that order.

For many corporations who’re not fully aware of all the tools available, deploying web marketing goes beyond your corporate website and google results.

---

The Many Forms of Web Marketing:

1) Corporate Domain
This has been a standard since the late 90s, nearly every company, mom and pop boutique now has a web presence. The primary purpose of this is to provide the public with information about your company, it’s products, and anything else they may need. Corporate websites often compose of several features that are listed below.

A) Corporate Site
Large to small companies have established a websites around their brand, the content is around marketing products, support, and corporate information. Despite the massive efforts to perfect the corporate website, much of the content is irrelevant as prospects shy away from marketing content and start to use social media.

B) Portal Strategy
Widely popular in the late 90s this strategy was intended to serve up all user information on one page, and keep users on one’s domain. A few well known portals now exist such as MyYahoo which is a form of a feedreader. Most modern marketers realize that content is now distributed.

C) Microsites for Segmentation
Typically deployed around new product launches or campaign focuses, or specific market segments, these often short term websites are used for calling specific attraction. They typically have a unique URL and are tied to an integrate campaign. See Microsoft’s Origami microsite. Caution: some companies overly deploy these microsites and end up with a distributed and unfocused web strategy.

D) Interactive Web Marketing
The web is more than a ‘read only’ medium, unlike other mediums, companies can make the website interactive, encouraging a new dynamic of engagement. There’s a variety of technologies to use from uses of Javascript, AJAX and Flash based. Of course, one can only go far where the limitation is that it is still a ‘user to computer’ interaction. A few examples include Subservient Chicken experience, What kind of M&M are you, and Geico’s Caveman Crib.

E) Intranet
The web isn’t just for communicating to prospects and customers, similar strategies apply to your employees. You can get more information by joining the Intranet User Experience Group, or find other online resources to this specific field..

F) Extranet
Used for communications with partners, or customers, extranets are secured websites that companies grant access to. Features could include dashboards, updates, support information, and detailed product information.

G) Regionalization
In today’s global web, websites are translated, reformatted and segmented by region, culture, class. Be sure to focus on France, China, Japan as fast emerging languages. Also see report on internet usage in third world countries.

2) Search Marketing
Ever heard of Google? Many prospects use google in the ‘hunt’ phase for a product. By paying a third party or a search engine directly you can obtain a strategy to get your website listed in search results. I’ve heard a variety of stats demonstrating success of natural vs paid results, however the ROI is usually positive. It’s likely your competitor is also present on the Search results page. View my few posts on Search Strategy or contact Andy Beal, David Berkowitz or Brian Keith.

A) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Many web groups at large corporations have a document, a process, or even a dedicated resource who’s goal is to make sure web content is easily found, indexed, managed and correctly served in search results. There’s been some recent discussion the state of the SEO industry.

B) Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Frequently, companies will hire a specialized search company to purchase keywords that will help drive contextual links in search results. These ads are contextually displayed based upon the search query. There’s a growing and sometimes controversial industry focused on these techniques.

3) Out Bound and Syndicated Web Marketing
Used to help ideas spread off the corporate website, this list of tools extends reach by direct channels, and as well as ‘pull’ techniques where users opt-in. Be savvy when using these tools to respect the best interests of your customers, otherwise it’s one-click to unsubscribe or spam.

A) Email Marketing
While certainly not completely native to the web, they certainly are tied. Modern email campaigns (sometimes even direct marketing) involves barely personal emails blasted out to indviduals on a mailing list. These modern versions typically have the option to be HTML based, and have hyperlinks brining users back to the corporate site or Microsite. I hear the conversion rate for these are 2-5%, and typically deploy a positive ROI. Having spoken with many Web directors and Marketers, this is a task best suited for an outsourced vendor. Be sure to read the research on the growth for this industry in 2007.

B) Invasive Marketing
“Pop-ups”, and “Pop-Unders”, trojan and tracking software are both disruptive methods to obtain the attention and data of users. Research indicates this form of marketing is diminishing, use with caution, or not at all (ask your Ad Agency if they are doing this without your knowledge) remember the market can associate your brand with the way you reach them, and users are now in charge.

C) Syndicated Content and RSS
I lump Syndication into this category as I see it as being an evolution as marketing shifts from Push to Pull. RSS is quickly becoming a method where users can opt-in for additional content. For more information start with Six RSS Resources for the Internet Professional or Web Strategist, when you’re ready to deploy read Web Strategy: Understanding Syndicated Feeds for your Corporate Website.

4) Brand Extension
This is not a new concept, it’s simply been applied to web properties. The strategy is simple: where your market is, so should your brand.

A) Web Advertising
I’m sure you’re all familiar with the banner, tile, or skyscraper advertising (IAB) model on websites. This age old strategy simply suggests that if there are eyeballs your brand should ‘impress’ upon the users. Click through rates are typically in the 1% or lower rate, sometimes success is measured by brand impressions, (visitation by traffic). These ads are static and do not change even if the content on the webpage changes.

B) Contextual Advertising
These targeted ads will be served up on the webpage depending on the content that’s on the page. This is a more ‘intelligent’ and therefore more relevant than Web Advertising, which may not be targeted at specific content. This form of advertising can be text, images, media or other form and are common on websites, blogs, and are now appearing on web based emails sites. (Submitted by David Berkowitz: Feb 13th. 2007)

C) Sponsorship and /Cross branding
This is a method of promoting your brand with the right audience in which the property is rewarded for integrating your brand. This can occur on content sites, shows, media properties, blogs, podcasts, and just about everything else. This is expected to increase in 2007.

D) Social Advertisements
Having just appeared this year from Facebook, it uses contextual information from users who have become “Fans” of a brand, then ads are severed to their network, in an endorsement. This has been highly controversial, and the return on investment is not yet known.

E) Widget Advertising
Having just appeared this year from on containers like Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, and Friendster, widgets have proliferated at an amazing growth rate. Expect advertising networks to form over the next year, where a brand can purchase space on any number of widgets across different social networks and communities, groups such as: RockYou, Slide, Widgetbox, and Watercooler to start with. See all posts tagged Widget Strategy.

F) Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing programs compensate partners and alliances that bring referrals, leads, or sales. While it overlaps with other forms of web marketing, the goal is to provide the right content or products to the target demographic. Examples of this include placement on comparison shopping sites, loyalty sites, and product review sites.

5) Community Marketing and Social Media Marketing
eMarketer’s research indicates that this is the fastest growing area of growth for Web Advertising and Marketing is in the Social Media space. In my experience, the awareness rate is around 30% and deployment 10-20% for most corporations. Some of the tools listed below are not new, while some become critical in how prospects find information about products. Remember this section is less about the tools than it is about the end result: people connecting with other people.

A) eCommerce/Rating Sites
For most consumer products and a majority of enterprise products, there’s a variety of websites that rate products both by expert (sometimes called analyst) or peer review. The most popular site that has done this in the text industry is CNET reviews which deploys both editorial reviews, video demos, and user ratings and opinions. Content can be both positive and negative about your company as well as your competitors. Ratings and voting has evolved with popular news voting sites like Digg.

B) Social Networking, Forums, Wikis, Collaboration
I’m tying these two together as both features are starting to merge in many modern versions. While founded from early usenet days, forums allow for communities to form around similar ideas and collaborate. Approximately 33% of companies deploy forums. Wikis have also been used to tie industries together as well as. Savvy marketers are starting to also realize the power of social networking sites in every flavor of focus, including image sharing sites like flickr for marketing. I’ve created a list of all White Label Social Networking platforms.

C) Syndicated Marketing
See section 3C above.

D) Podcast Marketing
Many corporations are reaching their community though on demand content on mobile devices, the key to this medium is certainly in the ‘pull’ strategy. I’ve listed out my recommendations in a recent post called Corporate Podcasting Strategies for 2007.

E) Blogging
I estimate about 30% or less of businesses are considering blogs (web logs) as forms of business communication. The subject has been talked about quite extensively, I recommend reading Naked Conversations, the Weblog Handbook, and the Corporate Blogging Book. To learn about all the forms of businesses blog. If you’ve not yet deployed a Corporate Blogging program, I reccomend learning from my experience as a corporate blog evangelist.

F) Widget Marketing
Widgets are light weight web applications that are being embedded in websites, blogs, forums, and social sites. Flickr badges, MyBlogLog, and in ways even the Firefox community marketing campaign are companies that are engaged in this way. This isn’t anything new, I noticed this trend before the term gained popularity, and called it Viral Chicklets, to learn more there’s a growing list of examples on Widgetbox.

G) Online Video and Live Streaming
While Online Video has existed for many years on the web, it’s most notably been gaining traction from the video blog, or video sharing sites of great popularity such as Google Video, or it’s recent acquisition YouTube. I recommend starting with thinking about Video for your Executives and thought leaders. This also includes live streaming where participants can webcast video in real time, often accomplished by chat features, see this full list of live streaming companies.

H) Instant Messaging, Presence
Clever marketers are figuring out how to involve real time conversational media using Instant Messaging tools, presence, and status tools, such as Twitter. These tools tie to online and mobile devices. My experience with Generation Y is that they are using IM as their primary way to communicate over all other mediums.

I) Tagging, Collective Tools
I’ve discussed how tagging can be used to harvest marketing intelligence as well as help your SEO results. See using Delicious for Market Research. Properly tagging content as well as researching how tags are used will help communities find your content.

J) Voting Features
Popularized with the website Digg, members submit news stories and they are voted up by the community. More representative than democratic, there’s criticism that only a few hundred users can control the content that makes it to the front page. This has also been deployed in corporate extranets, such as Dell’s IdeaStorm where customers can vote for future products or features. Expect this feature to appear in other websites over the next year.

K) MicroMedia
These microblogging tools allow users to share bite sized information with their social network or from mobile phones. With the launch of Twitter spring 2007, it started to gain traction, as well as Pownce and Jaiku. Expect this form to be a major form of communication for 2008, as it starts to gain hold. See all posts tagged MicroMedia.

L) Infinite Other Flavors
The list of potential applications can go on and on, from Toolbar plugins such as Delicious plugin, Alexa Plugin Attention recorder, etc, to web based mobile applications. User voted news sites are rapidly appearing such as Digg. There’s a whole another category (read all my posts tagged Community Marketing) on the many different forms the above tools create when they’re combined, from Community sites like Microsoft’s Channel 9 to real time Conversation indexes like Techmeme or Technorati’s WTF, new ways to find, sort and harness information will emerge over the year. The notable attributes include a ‘community’ or ‘viral’ and ‘conversational’ tone to them.

6) Virtual Worlds
Tied both to online gaming and social networks, the virtual world emulations have gone from experimental to a haven for some immersive communities.

A) Virtual Worlds
Second Life is being trialled by large companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Sears and a variety of retailers, although there are many other virtual worlds such as ViOS, ActiveWorlds, Entropia Universe, Utherverse (Redlight Center & more)

B) Online Massive Multi Player Games
Also popular are Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG for short) are appearing online such as World of Warcraft (WoW), and Club Penguin a growing online game for kids, teens, and some adults. XBox 360 has IPTV capabilities and most console games have online components, so there are multiple experiences to tap into. Opportunities include content cross-over, branded experiences, and external social networks on the internet.

C) Online Games
Gaming networks have started to create mini-flash games such as mini-clips, Yahoo Games, and other networks. Supplemented with advertising or sponsored branding, these can be embedded and spread to other websites.

7) Related Mediums
The web will be a platform and will extend to other mediums as well as create new ones.

A) Internet TV (IPTV)
While still emerging, the web will marry the TV and content, communication will evolve to a new form of media we’ve not yet seen yet. I doubt it will be as simple as ‘TV content online’ or ‘Reading websites in the living room’. Something new will appear, and it will impact your web team. See all my thoughts on IPTV.

B) Mobile Content
Websites are already being viewed on mobile devices, either full browsers, or fast load browsers. Many executives, decision makers, road warriors and techies are accessing the web using mobile devices, so a strategy to deliver correctly to this medium is necessary. See all my thoughts on Mobile Technology.

8 ) Experimental: To Watch
While not yet here, here are some following forms to watch this coming year.

A) Portability of the Social Graph
Currently, social network members have to add over and over new contacts, and inaccuracy between networks is common. Expect the social graph (the online representation of your network) to be separated from the social networks. Websites will soon have members interacting with each other as the social graph extends to static websites. Read all posts tagged Social Graph.

B) Vendor Relationship Management
Purely conceptual, expect a systems to rely on the intents of prospects or buyers to emerge, which will anonymously signal to vendors to bid for the needs of customers. Learn more from Doc Searls program.

Putting it all Together
Whew, that’s the major families, but remember for many corporations, these elements will not be successful in a vacuum, the opportunity for momentum happens when they are combined and used strategically. At least one person or group should have full knowledge of how your brand is being used online and in other mediums.

---

Translations
If you’d like to translate this, feel free to do, then leave a comment below, I’ll add you to this list, as well as call you out in a separate post.

Indonesian Version of this post

Italian Version of this post

French version of this post

139 comments

For the web professional, there are various activities that occur on a consistent basis, I’ve boiled them down to three succint types of activities. Working as a lowly production UI designer to managing a global website, I’ve had to do all.

The Three Web Activities: Task, Project, and Business Programs

---

The Task

What: A web task is a short term undertaking that could involve any type of activity that supports a website.

Examples: These could be content changes, database checks, stylesheet changes, or reporting and monitoring.

Who: Typically assigned to the content, development, web analysts, production, or engineering team, these are the core activities that keep the website running efficiently.

---

The Project

What: A specific-duration activity, this project involves the completion of a goal, and success is measured upon completion and timeliness to complete.

Examples: Several projects may be going on during any given time such as a redesign project, code upgrade, cms install, or language translation.

Who: Often assigned to a web manager, business analyst, or dedicated project manager, this person may call upon resources from various teams in the company from the web team, marketing, and often IT.

---

The Business Program

What: These ongoing business programs (not to be confused a web application ‘program’) are the heart of a web managers purpose, their job is to manage these ongoing programs with a specific goal in mind: increase revenue or decrease costs. These web programs are designed to fulfill objectives of a web strategy.

Examples: the Intranet program, the Extranet program, the International website program, the Community Program, the Blogging Program, or the corporate website program.

Who: This duty is typically relegated to the Web Strategist (titles include web manager, web director, vp of web marketing). They will employ a number of ongoing resources to properly allocate for content, code, production, management, and ongoing maintainence.

While any of these activities can be outsourced, it’s ill-advised to outsource the entire activity, as control and management will be needed. Learn more, see the three spheres of web strategy, or my employer’s Forrester POST methodology for social computing endeavors.

7 comments

Summary
Live Interactive Video Streaming, also called live streaming, life casting, or event streaming can provide the web strategist with a low-cost effective tool to enhance communications to customers. This document outlines the most successful ways to use these tools, and provides some best practices.

Situation
Live streaming has gotten the attention of the media, press, and bloggers, yet when peering back in history, it’s not a new technology. The big difference is that there are many providers that offer this service and it’s the frequently self-publishing of individuals on blogs makes it easy for anyone to get in on the action

Opportunity
Live video streaming in an inexpensive and ‘human’ medium that can involve a community in an interactive online event.

Definition
Life Interactive Video Streaming: A real time video that is often created from a webcam or embedded camera on a laptop (many Macs come standard with this) that let’s anyone publish in real-time to their audience. The interaction part comes from the live attendees being able to interact with each other and the show creator in a real time chat room. I find this attributed to be critical in describing this form of the medium.

---

Three Effective Use Cases:

1) Event Streaming
One of the best uses of live interactive video streaming is at events, whether at corporate ones, conferences, or product announcements. Supplement your many events with this inexpensive service by assigning an employee (or inviting an existing event streamer) to your event. Provide them with power, robust internet access (Lan line prefereed) and a good location to setup their camera. In come situations, if the event is already being streamed, it’s possible to import the existing audio and video feed into the site, making it easier.

Who’s doing this? Corporate events, presidential debates, conferences organizers

Risks: I’ve seen issues where corporate firewalls have caused havoc in setup, mismatch between audio video gear, and lastly, issues with existing video crews not wanting to participate due to threat of newer cheaper tools, or ‘union rules’.

2) Crises
Ever had a crises? Sure you have, nearly every brand is going to have an exploding product or downed website. In the new live and social web, the best thing to do is to put your best face forward, apologize, and demonstrate to your customers how you genuinely and authentically fix issues. Take zooomr for example, this two man photo sharing startup by Kris Tate and Thomas Hawk was going to release a new version of their website, but sadly, the upgrade went horribly wrong, and the site went down, and appeared by unrecoverable. Rather than scurrying away, they use live interactive streaming to broadcast and show exactly what they were doing to fix the issue. They streamed for over a week on end and showed how they were fixing the problem, even when they were too dead tired to carry on. In the end, they earned the trust of their community, received donations, and eventually got their website back up.

Risks: Exposing how weak you are during a vulnerable time is a risky strategy, but one that could win over the community if you are honestly giving the effort to correct what your audience and customers want. Authenticity requires genuine action.

3) You’re interesting
This pretty much applies to all other situations. For many digital egoists, they are applying life casting and streaming to the whole world their very minutia of their lives. Sadly, after the hype has left the medium nearly half a year ago, the world has stopped caring about watching the lives of an average Joe or Jane. Only people with very interesting lives will gain traction and audience from life streaming. Those would include the rich, famous, actors, musicians, talented, or the very attractive. Secondly, those who live in very unique areas or have a unique lifestyle (like NY’s “Naked Cowboy”) will get traction.

For companies, if you have a very unique behind the scenes process that you want to share about your products being manufactured, or have an exceptionally busy of amazing store (or a view from that store) consider using live video web streaming. Depending on the situation, you may want to turn off comments.

Risks: Failing to truly be interesting will result in wasted time and embarrassment from your peers. Learn to use these tools effectively.

How to get started?

Input Device: Locate an on-board webcam, or purchase a webcam (a hundred dollar Logitech is more than sufficient for most uses. For higher quality events and conferences, consider using higher grade cameras and mics for best production

Services: There’s quite a few Live Video Streaming services available, you can see my master list (which has been republished by the LA Times) to find the right one for you and your demographic.

Experiment internally: Start playing with these tools to get familiar with their strengths and weaknesses. Try obtaining an EDVO card to stream from remote locations. Also test if these tools work behind the firewall.

Integrate with other communications: I found that if you plan to live stream an event, you’ll need to tell attendees in advance so they can schedule on their calendars to attend. Also consider using Twitter to attract people to your stream.

Interact: The best case scenarios are when the audience gets to help guide and lead the experience. As a result, they will feel ownership, stay engaged, and want to be part of the experience. Read and participate in the forums in near real time, ask questions, let them guide and be part of the show. For example, I used live streaming at the web 20 expo and the viewers told me who they wanted me to interview, where, and what sessions to cover.

My Background with Live Video Streaming
I was one of the first to use event streaming at the Web 2.0 expo using Ustream.tv technology. Working with that team, we experiemented with the medium, which included giving a set to Robert Scoble. I use a tripod, and created an ‘online show’ and interviewed hundreds of attendees, and Robert became a temporary lifecaster. In our final panel, Chris Pirillo joined us, and has been publishing his Live Pirillo show ever since.

Lastly, I was on the Board of Advisors for Ustream.tv, until joining Forrester as an Analyst. I’m very familiar with this growing market.

Additional Resources
For more information, read all my posts tagged Web Strategy (they’re like white papers, or reports) or all posts tagged live video streaming.

2 comments

Many are talking about the Social Graph at the technical level, leaving many business folks with many questions. The following, using clear business language (void of tech speak), will explain what is the Social Graph, why it matters, and what you should do.

---

In respecting your time, I’ve boiled down the entire post to seventy words:

Executive Summary
The Social Graph is the representation of our relationships. Today, these graphs define our personal, family, or business communities on social websites. Unfortunately, we’re duplicating our same Social Graph on multiple websites, resulting in inaccurate data and time spent managing it. Despite many challenges, our Social Graphs should be self-managed from a single trusted source, replicated to websites of our choosing, thus resulting in accurate, efficient, relationship management.

---

Want to be able to have an intelligent conversation with others on the topic? The detailed, more in-depth analysis follows:

Situation
Relationships are nothing new, from paper based address books, to the arrangement of huts in early villages, we’re social creatures. The big change? The internet has broken down physical barriers, allowing us to connect and create online communities.

Online social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Ancestry.com, and thousands of others are increasing in global adoption. I predict that social networking features will be part of nearly every website.

While we have many networks, and thus many social graphs they often fit into three major categories: business, personal, and family. Alex Iksold breaks down the components to three specific elements: People Identity, Type of Relationships, and Relationships Identity. These relationships can be mapped, displayed, or documented in what we call the Social Graph.

[Definition: The Social Graph is the representation of our relationships. In present day context, these graphs define our personal, family, or business communities on social networking websites]

Pains
Today, individuals are part of many online social networks. Sadly, the same Social Graph is inefficiently being duplicated; we’re forced to add the same contacts to each social network. Beyond frustration, this results in inaccurate networks, and inability to control our own data. As we join and register more websites, this pain will grow exponentially.

[Unfortunately, we’re duplicating our same Social Graph information on websites with social features, it’s annoying to manage and inaccurate across sites. These disparate and disjointed social graphs will not scale, ultimatly resulting in a fragmented user experience as we use multiple websites]

Opportunity: Aggregating Social Graphs
The idea is simple: Allow relationships to be quickly shared once and then replicated across multiple websites. A movement has been started to allow these relationships to be transplanted from one social network to another. The goal? reduce inefficient adding of relationships, improving the accuracy of the network, and providing users with control and management of their relationship data.

Benefits

Users: For users this means efficiency and control over one’s personal data, their relationships, and how they are deployed on different social networks, it makes navigating the web better.

Social Networks: For companies that are social networks, they can benefit by increasing the amount of users as the social graph will populate all of a users network they permit.

All other websites: For companies that are not currently social networks, (like a corporate website) expect these social features to be part of your site. People will co-surf and share information about your content whether you like it or not.

Scenario: What does success look like?
In the most ideal scenario, aggregation of the social graph would allow Ted to quickly move from one social network to another, his trusted contacts would be pre-populated (as specified by Ted) and sharing of information would be instant. Furthermore, Ted would be able to quickly aggregate all information about his friend Chris on one page, and see what Chris has chosen to share across all social networks. Lastly, Ted would have full control over his graphs and can remove, adjust, or modify at will. Ted is in control, has accurately updated information from his social networks, and saves time at work, in his personal life, and with his family. He has more time to do what he really wants, which is to read this Web Strategy blog.

How can this be accomplished?
By centralizing a users Social Graph on a trusted, third party area that can be a central place where relationships are updated, and then replicated to every social networking website using a common process and technology.

Many Challenges
Like many new initiatives, we’ve not laid out the infrastructure for open relationship movement, there’s a few obstacles to overcome.

Social Network vendors scared to open up and let customers and their relationships easily move to other networks

Agreement needed between all vendors and participants

Ownership over project and data

Lack of general market awareness

User adoption (sadly, I think most users are sheep)

Likely, a need for a single login

Creation and costs of third-party silo

Privacy concerns: many European countries may not embrace

Multiple security issues

Legal and government may get involved

As an industry, these challenges are not insurmountable, what’s required is a clear roadmap, willingness for vendors to ‘let go’ and industry-wide support.

Future Outlook
Recently, an alliance called OpenSocial was formed between Google, MySpace, (list) to create an agreement so applications could easily be ported from one network to another. Although still at it’s starting point this alliance should be the precursor to establishing the management and flexibility of the Social Graph. To learn more about OpenSocial read: Explaining OpenSocial to your executives.

[Ideally, our Social Graphs should be self-managed from a single trusted source, and then replicated to websites of our choosing, thus resulting in accurate, efficient relationship management]

What you should do:

1) Wait and Watch: We’re still at the conceptual level, although several vendors are working hard to release products or services to fix this, there’s not much to do.

2) Plan: If you work for a company that has relationships on it’s website (having a ‘login’ is a key indicator) then you should make your web teams aware of this market change, and have an internal discussion.

3) Obtain more information: I’ve created a new tag called Social Graph on this blog, and will keep you updated of changes as I see it. Being an industry analyst, vendors will brief me, I’ll analyze with my peers, and report back.

Additional Resources:

Brad Fitzpatrick, who’s leading the movement provides solutions and discusses where he’s at, developers should work with him.

Plaxo, a vendor in this space is moving forward: Building an Open Social Graph

Six Apart: Is supporting and will release versions of the social graph

Alex Iksold: Social Graph Concepts and Issues

Jim Calhoun: Has a great video where he explains how the Social Graph works

Josh of RWW suggests that we should retire the term Social Graph and use the term Social Network

Dave Winer: Suggest we use the term social network, I get what he’s saying, yet the need for portability and aggregation between social networks that is the crux of the issue.

I suggest that one way is to use a browser as a viewer for the social graph

Why this analysis?
When I’m asked the same question several times (in this case, colleague Jennifer D and Bill Claxton), it’s a signal to write an explanatory blog post.

Feedback from peers
I’m trying to be as accurate as possible and incorporated the feedback of the two-line definition from my peers at the Blog World Expo which included Marshall Kirkpatrick, Jeremy Pepper, Jake McKee, Stephanie Agresta, Chris Heuer, and anyone else who would listen to me. Please note they did not approve or review the rest of the text.

Your comments wanted, even if you don’t agree
For more posts like this, I’ve tagged it Web Strategy, where I publish many how-to, and what-you-should-know posts

If you have suggestions to improve this document, leave a comment, and I’ll update as appropriate, I hope you share this with others.

60 comments

By Jeremiah Owyang, insight from Charlene Li and Shar VanBoskirk. This is also being cross-posted on the Forrester Marketing Blog.

Executive Summary
Both Facebook and MySpace have launched profile and network targeted advertising and marketing products. As they both use member interests and the communities which they are part of, trust continues to become key in adoption as information is passed along the network. The sheer size of MySpace’s member base, as well as the thriving local business membership will lead to success. Facebook, which brings a unique solution evolves advertisements to endorsements and encourages members to subscribe to a brand in what we are calling “Fan-Sumers” (an evolution of the consumer). As consumers share their affinities, brands can advertise using trusted social relationships.

---

Data: Highest trust comes from friends or acquaintances

(Left Graph: Consumers trust their friends and acquaintances far more than any other sources –Report: Leveraging User-Generated Content, 2007)

Trust is and will continue to be one of the most important attributes in the decision making process.

Communities form online, trust develops
How we get information continues to evolve as communities form online organized by individuals with similar interests. Just like in real life, we identify our interests, and are often influenced by opinions and experiences of trusted peers in our communities. For many, social networking sites embody these relationships and influence how trusted decisions are made.

---

MySpace: Brands have a home and can hyper-target ads
The already active MySpace platform is leveraging their already active member profile pages, encouraging the many small and medium businesses to setup a online storefront and providing tools to make it easy to self-serve advertisements to their customers. It’s easy to make the case that demand and inventory are present.

[Brands can now self-serve a targeted marketing and advertising campaign within the already thriving MySpace community]

Webmaster not needed: MySpace profile for businesses
Small businesses can continue to build their online profile on MySpace (many of them already have), but now, because of their familiarity with self-marketing (restaurant, nightclub, and other local businesses and their customers) on Myspace.

Self-service ads remove middle man
When friction is removed, efficiency is created. With MySpace’s “Self-Service” ad network small businesese can target ads across a variety of affinities (over 300) and deploy ads on users’ profile pages. These ads, which should (by theory) be relevant and contextual to a user who has self-populated their profile page will have these ads displayed.

Advertising balance required in already busy MySpace
With marketers already with a strong presence in MySpace this could continue to erode away at early adopter “cool kids” from embracing MySpace. But as cycles have shown, where communities form, marketers follow.

User experience continues to be free-form
These ads, which will conform to IAB advertising standards (sizes) will give advertisers the freedom to create the ads in the style accustomed to the network. Yes, expect more blinking text.

To watch: OpenSocial
As OpenSocial starts to be deployed across MySpace and other partners, expect profile ads to be tied to widgets and vice versa; a fabric of links. I’ve already outlined How to explain OpenSocial to your executives.

Inaccurate user profiles could result in mis-targeting of ads
We know that many members do not make their profiles accurate which could yield inconsistencies in how and where ads are displayed. While MySpace has assured they’re accounting for rogue outliers, expect some inefficiencies in advertisements.

Our Call: Sheer mass will yield success
We think this to be a win for MySpace, given their great reach, there are millions of users with active profiles, and there’s also plenty of inventory as many small and local businesses that are present will be comfortable deploying ads where their community already exists.

---

Facebook: Rise of the Fan-Sumer
Going beyond just profile matching of advertisements, Facebook allows consumers to self-identify with brands and becoming fans. In turn, brands can use these “Fan-Sumers” as endorsers to their own trusted networks, resulting in trusted word-of-mouth. Brands can also self-manage their own campaigns, and there’s some unique opportunities for eCommerce widgets or applications to be part of this formula.

[Using Facebook, consumers will publicly endorse brands, resulting in the birth of the “Fan-Sumer”, causing efficient word-of-mouth marketing in their trusted network]

There are three major components to today’s announcement, they include the following:

1) Facebook Pages: Brands get their own profile
For the first time, businesses will legitimately be able to setup profile pages, much like MySpace’s business profiles feature. Next, Facebook members will add these brands as ‘fans’ (much like friends) and this will produce a connection between the parties. Members will self-identify with brands in what we are calling “Fan-Sumers”. Furthermore, this service, called “Beacon” gives third parties the ability to share information on the newsfeed and provides lots of unique opportunities. Sponsored groups will start to evolve into this new form brand profile as this system gets adopted.

2) SocialAds: Endorsements at the friend level lead to eCommerce
Once a member has indicated they are a fan of a brand, that brand can choose to purchase SocialAds (from Facebook Sales or via a self-service platform). A unique endorsement of a product or brand will now appear on that individuals news feed or banner or skyscraper ads. Advertisers can purchase social ads target by profile demographics and profiles, as well as by activities done in Facebook. Payment is an auction-based system available to marketers via both CPM and CPC pricing.

3) Use “Insight” for control and flexibility
This self-service dashboard called Insight gives the marketer detailed knowledge how their advertising campaign is working on Facebook. It’s expected that advertisers will have flexibility, control over the type of ads they deploy, in what quantity, and the demographics they want to target.

A likely scenario:
Shauna, who enjoys Revlon products, indicates she’s a fan of the brand and becomes a Fan-Sumer. Marketers at Revlon can then purchase SocialAds, which will then display on Shauna’s newsfeed or on ads on her profile. If Shauna purchases Revlon makeup from Amazon, her newsfeed could indicate an eCommerce links recommending it to her 100 trusted friends, resulting in further sales.

[The traditional marketing funnel as we know it is distorted; endorsements are now passed from trusted customers to prospects, not direct from the brands themselves]

Implications for Facebook:

Members have more control over ads
Facebook users can opt to turn off social ads, and friends of that user can ‘dial down’ endorsements they see using preferences. We believe that Facebook is attempting to respect the rights of users by giving control to members to ‘opt-in’ to become a Fan-Sumer.

Quest for Fans will cause brands to beg
Since social ads only work if a member has indicated they are a fan, brands will be working to earn and buy fans to accept them as members. Expect a lot of noise to be generated from this activity as brands run campaigns to encourage members to add them as fans through discussion boards, banner ads, and special offers.

Hard to qualify a “business”
Facebook is limiting these features to ‘real’ businesses and organizations. Expect an entire team to be crawling and dealing with this qualifying the issue. As recent member accounts have been disabled from Facebook, expect businesses and organizations to encounter same issues.

Limited ad supply to raise prices
Because Facebook members will see only two social ads per day, we expect the supply of ads to be in scarce supply and thus raising prices and not matching the value. This could shift ad buying to large brands who have experience buying and managing search and direct response ads.

Our Call: Brand affinity leads to community endorsements and more trusted marketing.
We see this as a win for Facebook, this highly targeted system isn’t just about web advertising but about brand affinity and hooks into what’s really important, trusted endorsements from people in a network. This truly is the next generation of advertising. Facebook tells us that the worst case it will be 2 times click through rate over the performance of (existing is 4-26%)

---

Next Steps For Brands

Experiment: Because of the control and flexibility, we recommend to brands that are currently on either of these social networks to experiment and test.

Learn how to efficiently manage your campaigns. There’s clearly a trend towards self-service, which provides efficiencies for both businesses and the platforms.

To know: Marketing has changed, advertising is no longer a sole-solution. Marketers must also learn how to be part of communities, engage with them, and be part of the conversation.

To know: Marketing is now distributed, brands must embrace communities where they currently exist, rather than solely driving them to their corporate website.

[While traditional search advertisers like Google and Yahoo match by keyword, My Space and Facebook match on something far more powerful: people and their relationships]

This digest not only explains what is happening, but why it matters to you. If this was helpful, please pass it on. Love to hear your thoughts, please leave a comment, even if you don’t agree.

122 comments

You: A Web Strategist
You’re an individual who is responsible for the long term direction of a website, and meets the requirements of business, community, and technology. Part of your role is to keep your website profitable, even if it doesn’t generate direct revenue streams.

Situation
As you plan out the direction of your website, there are multiple ways to bring your web strategy to fruition, I’m listing out these methods below.

The Many Forms of Monetization using the Web:

---

Marketing
What’s Marketing? Everyone has a hard time describing this activity but I’ll break it down for you with my definition: The activity of bringing products and customers together.

Advertising
The most common form of monetization for websites is Advertising, it works great for media sites, blogs, and other news and media sites. For the corporate web strategist, their goal is to get ads on these sites. ConversionRater has listed out the many forms of advertising including:

Contextual Advertising

Display Advertising

Targeted Advertising

Text Link Advertising

Sponsorship
I’m calling this out as separate than advertising as often sponsors are infused into website or media as part of the experience. One example that often comes to mind is the infusion of the ScobleShow and Seagate brand. Robert mentions the brand uses the products, and displays the logo on a variety of media he creates. Please note I’m a former employer employee of PodTech, so here’s a few other examples: Chris Pirillo’s live stream show is sponsored by Dell and others, a perfect fit. Recently, Ask a Ninja of Federated Media created some customer shows to promote blades of steel, a cross over and viral marketing campaign.

Paid Content and Advertorials
Often in magazines and newspapers we’ll see advertorial sections that –at first glance– appear to be editorial of the publication. These paid content areas likely have useful or valuable knowledge being shared, but at the same time will guide the user towards a marketing direction. Media websites can offer these advertorial sections to their websites, allowing marketers to publish content. Transparency is required, don’t even think of trying to slip one over your users, as when they find out (they always do) a rebellion will occur.
Thanks Andy Beard via comments

Syndication of Content
By repurposing content from other channels, or displaying your content on other websites can result in residual revenue in micropayments or fixed pricing. Displaying content feeds from other sources can result in content providers paying money to the provider.

Affiliations
For many websites, providing recommended links to partners can be steady stream of links and revenue from commission. Amazon’s book recommendations program is an example of this. It’s important that the website be fully transparent about the relationship of the linking and recommendations. Companies that aggregate content and distribute to other companies can receieve a micro-payment for such activities, for example: Mozilla’s Firefox generates regular amounts of micro-payments from users that use their search bar in the top right on the browser.

Donations
I put this under the Marketing bucket as the same types of activities are required to obtain donations from groups or individuals. This common method requests money be given to a cause, in return goodwill is shared from recognition (or badges to be placed on website) tax benefits, or knowing that one has supported something they believe in.

Conversion
Not all websites make direct revenue, although Marketers can bring prospects closer to the sales point. In some companies, those that bring qualified leads get paid, a dollar amount is defined for those leads. Websites can generate interests from marketing activities, contact sheets, qualification activities that eventually result in sales. Although indirect, don’t overlook this powerful form of revenue generation.

Financial
For many web strategists and founders, this is considered the ‘exit strategy’. Although not listed directly, long term monetization and steady revenue growth is often a method to grow.

Acquisition
The most talked about for today’s startup is the opportunity to get purchased by a large web entity. A few come to mind Flickr, Mybloglog, Upcoming > Yahoo, Measuremap, Google Analytics, Blogger > Google, MySpace > Newscorp, and others. Most notably the sale of YouTube to Google for $1.5 billion is a good indicator of an exit. This also includes domain squatting.

Initial Public Offerings
More common in the first web wave (I used to be at Exodus) IPOs are a company’s way to sell ownership of it’s company to the open public, these purchasers became shareholders, and eventually the value of the shares (and company) would increase. The founders and employees maintained a significant share of the company in which they eventually (hopefully) would sell and profit. This form of monetization has greatly tapered off in 2007, being very rare.

Investment and Partnership
Seen more frequently, and maybe not a direct form of long term revenue streams, many startups are receiving waves of funding from venture capital firms, or large partners. From Seed/Angel, A Round, B Round and partnership money we’re seeing these opportunities. Three year old Facebook recently received over $250 Million from advertising partner Microsoft. Although often not counted as ‘monetization’ methods, it truly keeps those who are running the site working, the lights on, and opportunities for growth.

Services
Key for ongoing revenue generation, websites that offer value added services to it’s users will grow.

Ecommerce
Brought to our attention during the first web phase, the “brick to click” mantra became talked about at many traditional retailer stores and has now solidified on many corporate websites, and etailers. Selling online goods, and providing recommendations to them provides and opportunity for the seller to either profit from selling their own goods, or a wholesaler or middleman to take a cut from the transactions.

Premium, Memberships, and Licensing
Common for websites that offer free service, feature-ladden exclusive memberships will provide users with additional benefits. A few examples include mail services offering additional storage, flickr offering more photo upload capacity, or access to other websites. This could also include software licensing options and white labels. (saw this from Brian’s list)

Virtual goods
Not to be overlooked, this form of monetization is growing steadily on Social Networks and Virtual websites. Objects (real and virtual) connotate value and meaning from the giver to the receiver, and can have a monetary value assigned. I’ve outlined the value of virtual goods, do not disregard.

Corollary Benefits
These are revenues that are generated as an outcome from the website itself. Based upon the feedback I’ve received from Twitter and in the comments, there’s some additional revenue opportunities.

Selling Data
Many websites collect information that can be resold to third parties. Data types could be: web traffic, search terms, registration information, email information. Please be open and transparent to your users when collecting information if this is your intention.

Secondary Opportunities
Opportunities to extend a brand into other mediums can generate revenue. In particular new jobs, speaking opportunities, writing opportunities, and syndication of content.

---

Additional Resources
Brian Oberkirch has a similar list to this one, I didn’t see it until now. If you want to get specific on blog monetization, problogger has a great list. Also read The Many Forms of Web Marketing.

Was this post helpful? Read the other posts tagged Web Strategy. Have any additions? Don’t agree with my taxonomy? I wanna know. Leave a comment and talk back!

35 comments

There’s so many people talking at the developer, strategist, and marketing level, I’m going to take it up for another audience, feel free to repurpose this content any way you want.

You: A web decision maker
As a Web Strategist, you are someone who is partially or wholly responsible for the long-term direction of your website, or the website of your client(s). You have to explain the announcement to your boss (or you are the boss), I’m going to help.

[Using portable applications, companies can now efficiently extend their website experience to existing communities on popular social networks]

Terms

Social Network: An existing network or community where people of similar interest share. MySpace, LinkedIn, and Hi5 are examples.

Mini-application, app, widget: These applications, created by third party developers or your company can sit on top of these existing thriving communities of connected people.

Platform, Container, Social Network: Where the mini-applications ’sit’ on top of and interact

API: The common code shared among platforms and developers of mini-applications

Situation: Nov 1st the “OpenSocial” is announced
Decisions are made on communities where trusted members share as a result, savvy companies go where their market is.

We’ve hit a milestone on how the web is becoming amorphous, data is about to be shared easily and quickly in a fluid way. Google and several other social networks in the alliance launched OpenSocial on Nov 1st. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook are not part of the announcement (yet).

Four months ago, Facebook allowed third party companies to build mini-applications in their site, this is similar in concept, but now includes many other players.

‘Platform’ or ‘Container’ where your mini-application can extend to: MySpace, Bebo, SixApart, Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

What is Open Social?<