As reported by Michael Garrett at profy, LinkedIn plans to release a developer API platform that would allow people to create new widgets or applications for LinkedIn – similar to what facebook did this year and what other sites such as MySpace and Friendster have announced they will do in order to slow down user migration to other social networking sites.  Although there are some great potential outcomes of this announcement, there are a few reasons why I believe their strategy needs further evaluation: 

1) Creating a walled garden within a walled garden. Applications developed on the new API platform must first get reviewed and approved before they can be made available to the community. This will stifle innovation. Let developers build what they want and let the community of LinkedIn users decide what is relevant or not.  

2) Developers will have to share revenue with LinkedIn…which is the opposite of where the industry is going. Given the user migration to facebook from other platforms in the last 8 months (LinkedIn included), why would a developer focus energy on a restrictive environment when they can create professional based applications and reap all the benefits from it on facebook? facebook is not just about sending electronic hamburgers… it’s increasingly also about professionals connecting in a simple, user-friendly environment where they make their own decisions on what is relevant or not.  Developers should be rewarded for their innovation.  

3) LinkedIn is not about engagement. Or community. As quoted on profy, they are not trying to get users to come back to the site multiple times a day. If you’re not trying to create engagement you aren’t going to increase your social graph. Isn’t social networking about engagement? If you are marketing a product or service, would you rather integrate it within a community like facebook that sees nearly 50% of their users return every day for at least 20 minutes, or with a site like LinkedIn that doesn’t care if you come back with any regular or predicted frequency?

4) Charging for premium services. Information should be free. LinkedIn still charges for their premium services. Free is a business model.  People are making money by giving stuff away and profiting from the engagement created.  Mitch Joel highlighted this in a recent post here.

Having said all of the above, there is great potential for LinkedIn to create something special and of value by allowing developers to create LinkedIn widgets that can be exported to other websites (even to facebook) with no restrictions, review processes, or threat of revenue sharing.

The future of social networking includes the idea of portability of identity – to other mediums (like mobile) and to other communities. Creating easy to export widgets that go beyond linking to somebody’s profile page on LinkedIn and creates true engagement based on permissions and profiling could create a massive increase in LinkedIn’s social graph….which they can profit from without taxing developers or their commmunity users. 

Understanding that LinkedIn has some specific goals with their new platform, they can still achieve them more transparently by offering rewards or incentives to developers for applications or widgets that meet specific criteria or goals in line with what they think people want.

Image credit: Pulse2.0 

The announcement of Google buying Jaiku is making waves in the industry. Imran Ali at Mobile Messaging 2.0 is calling it the most significant acquisition ever by Google. I’m calling it the continuation of a cold war arms race between Nokia and Google for world domination. Well World Mobile domination (the new WMD?) anyway.

From the East (or near-East… or near-near-East) there is Nokia. They are already world leaders in the mobile device space and have a neat mobile social network called MOSH. With their acquisition of Enpocket they now have a best in class mobile ad-delivery platform. With their acquisition of NAVTEQ they now have a best in class GPS-based mapping system to compete in the location based services (LBS) space.  With the Gartner Group forecasting that GPS based handsets will grow to around 40% by 2011 from 13% in 2007, clearly GPS or LBS could become the next killer mobile application. With all these acquisitions in the social networking / content space, Nokia is starting to look a lot like Google… 

From the West we have Google. They own search world wide and have become a massive advertising power with their Google AdWords platform…. a platform that is now being offered for free for mobile for a limited time.  Some have speculated that a mobile AdWords platform could subsidize carrier costs for the eventual release of a Google phone into the marketplace. Imagine a 3G phone loaded with Google widgets that costs little to nothing for the consumer. The g-phone could be an i-phone killer… or anything Nokia killer.

Combine the Google acquisition of Jaiku with the other recent announcement that Google also purchased Zingku – a mobile social utility tool that is web and SMS based and we have the makings of a mobile social networking platform that will rival all others.  Consider that Google already has a great installed base with Orkut (which is more popular than facebook in some parts of the world), it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that they’ll be playing in the mobile social networking space very soon. With all these acquisitions and developments, Google is starting to look a lot like Nokia…

Who will win this cold war…or will one buy the other eventually? One thing is for sure, following the mobile space is going to be very interesting over the next 18 months!

UPDATE 10/11: Nokia is also going into mobile search – check out this article on mobile semantic search!

Your investment in time and / or expense in Omniture or Google Analystics are safe…but you need to ensure that visitor frequency and advocacy are placed near the top of your dashboard as they are leading indicators on engagement.

Measuring frequency should go beyond how many return visitors you have. Take a longer term view (not just the day or week the campaign hit) and measure time between visits and length of visits – and whether or not each is getting shorter or longer. When you have a high percentage of users returning every day, you know you’ve got engagement. facebook for example gets over 50% return visitors every day and users spend on average 20 minutes on each visit! If you are not sure what is good or bad engagement…start by figuring out a consistent process for you to measure it. Once you have your baseline number you can start tracking net gain / decreases.

Measuring advocacy is a little less tangible. Although a frequent visitor is a leading indicator that you may have an advocate…. that visitor has to go from lurking on your site to contributing to your site…or telling others about your site. Advocates will link to your site by blogging and / or tweeting about you, your post, or your site. To figure out how many advocates you have, start by googling your website URL, brand name, product or service and see how many sites are linking to yours. You may be surprised at what you find! Also search social bookmarking / media sites to see if people are tagging your content on Del.ici.ous, Stumble Upon, Digg, Technorati, and through RSS subscriptions.

Traditional marketing campaigns often use the cost of customer acquisition as part of their return on investment (ROI) assessment.  To provide better insight in today’s web 2.0 digital environments, look at your cost of engagement and your return on engagement (ROE).

Which campaign would you rather invest in – the one that drives one time traffic to your site, or the one that creates customers, advocates and longer term awareness, affinity or loyalty to your brand?

Do you twitter? It’s a question I recently posed on my facebook account. Only a handful even knew what Twitter was…only three actually admitted to having a Twitter account.

Twitter is a really neat free social utility tool – it essentially allows you to post very short messages about what you are currently doing RIGHT NOW to the Twitter website – which you can personalize. This is very similar to creating status updates on MSN messenger or facebook…or even setting up email or SMS auto-replies.

The neat thing about Twitter is that you can follow somebody’s Twitter in many ways – either through a website (by visiting their site), as an update on your IM, as a SMS alert, RSS, or email. Think of it as micro-blogging – or blogging for people who don’t have enough to say to actually blog… or for people who want to say a few things but don’t want to create an entire blog posting around it.

I created my own Twitter account and admit i’m struggling to really find a use for it. After investing significant time in building my social equity on facebook, why do i need a separate social utility tool for status updates when facebook already does this automatically to my network of friends? Do i really want to tell people what i’m up to all the time? Do people even care? Will people accept my invitation to join Twitter in a lame attempt to make my twitter page more popular? I’m thinking the answer is no to all of the above.

Having said that, some people have said that Twitter has become a hot newswire – industry insight and news is sometimes available through a Twitter feed before it hits the blogs or news pages. I guess that’s important for some industry people…but does anybody else really care if they hear about industry news 3 hours before they read it in their RSS newsreader? One sign that Twitter has become a hit is the fact there are lots of imitations now available globally – like Pownce, Jaiku and Dodgeball.  Wikipedia reports that there are over 100 knock-offs of Twitter now. It seems like instant messaging 2.0 has arrived. 

As marketers, how do we leverage this channel to reach our audiences and deliver messages? If you are marketing an established personality (or trying to create one), this is an interesting space to play in. Celebrities and politicians have setup their own Twitter pages in order to connect with a younger audience. U.S. presidential candidate Obama has his own Twitter page here.

In previous blog posts I’ve discussed the idea around “Identity 2.0” or creating a way for people to manage their online profiles centrally so that they don’t need to manage multiple accounts or create new ones when they want to join new communities. I would suggest the same thing is or will be needed for micro-blogging to go mainstream.  Wouldn’t it be great if somebody created a widget that automatically updated my status on all my channels? In this scenario all I would do is create a status update on facebook and watch (or not) as the widget automatically publishes my status to Twitter, Pownce, MSN Messenger, my RSS feed, personal website, blog,  or email. I reference facebook because it’s easy, it’s already there and there is already huge social equity in the platform.  

If Twitter can build more social equity beyond the early adopter tech / celebrity / politician communities, it has a great chance of being really useful. The best way to do this will be through real integration with facebook, myspace, and all other social networking tools

UPDATE 10/07: IF you actually click on the Twitter settings within facebook, you can have Twitter automatically update your facebook status. Sweet!

LinkdedIn has sometimes been referred to as the “facebook” for professionals as the majority of registered users are over the age of 30. Now that facebook has grown up and grown beyond college social networking, is LinkedIn still relevant?  

With over 14 million subscribers in over 400 economic regions (as defined by LinkedIn), at first glance it would appear that the site is doing pretty well… although when put into perspective with a site like facebook that has nearly 40 million users as of September 2007 with the vast majority being at least weekly or monthly active users, LinkedIn seems less relevant.  A survey of my LinkedIn network reveals that most of my contacts rarely access the site and have found little value overall in being a member of their network. The reason?  LinkedIn was a good concept, but it was never a great website or experience. Now that we’ve all built up our social equity in other sites such as facebook, LinkedIn no longer seems relevant.

5 reasons why LinkedIn is no longer relevant (or 5 things they can do to regain relevance):

1) It’s not a community site by today’s standards. Where are the community tools? It would be nice to see RSS feeds and more ways for user generated content to be incorporated into the site.  How about a people map to visually link people in your network together? I’ve seen / experienced this done to great affect in other tools such as those offered by Leverage Software. If the tool is all about making connections or finding professinal matches, offer a visual way to see who is in your network…and offer filtering tools to change the view based on your preferences. The site needs to be more than a business card scan repository if you want engagement and relevance.

2) There is no mobile website – which is ridiculous when many “business” users have a blackberry or other PDA device and are already using the mobile web to access information and mobile email to keep in touch with contacts.  Having a mobile website that is built for the mobile web is now table steaks for any social networking site.  There are also no SMS alerts for when people in your network ask questions, send email & request updates etc. 

3) The current user interface and overall user experience is dated. The UI needs to be more intuitive. Give the site a new look, add some personality and make it easier to move around the site. A better user experience = more engagement which will lead to more social equity in the site.

4) Fee-based system. The free service is not bad…but why make the best features available only through the pay model? This restricts usage, engagement, and it’s social graph.  Web 2.0 sites are giving away everything away for free…so why pay anything for what is essentially a contact management website?

5) No unique or compelling offer. As marketers, we know in order for a campaign to succeed we need a strong call to action to get somebody’s attention – but if the product is not unique, people will not stay engaged. Try putting lipstick on a pig… people will still see that it’s a pig – albeit a more attractive one?  LinkedIn offers a way for people to look for jobs, find answers to their business questions and build their online reputation. The problem is that other sites do a much better job at this too – like monster.com for jobs and yahoo answers. Create something better…something unique and the social graph will get better.

If you believe like me that it’s time to link out of Linkedin…you better get started as it may take some time. Unlike other social media platforms, there is no automated way to disable your account and remove your profile from the LinkedIn system. You have to submit a customer support ticket to be removed. 

At least they are consistent.

UPDATE 9/25/07 – Just came across an interesting article on this topic over at brand and market blogspot

UPDATE 9/27/07 – Check out book on LinkedIn entitled “I’m on LinkedIn…now what?” by Jason Alba

It’s here, it’s cool and now all our friends have given in to the peer pressure and have signed up. Now that we’ve setup our profiles and added all the widgets that help you score cool points, what’s next with facebook? Some in the media are already predicting its demise, or stating that people will move on to the next coolest thing. That may be true…but until that next thing manifests itself, I have some thoughts on what I think would make facebook a better place for us all:

1) RSS all the way. Why not allow ALL content within your profile AND groups be exportable through RSS or through a widget builder that will allows user to repurpose existing content on their own personal blogs, sites, or communities? Seems only logical…and it will make groups more viral & relevant again.

2) Be nicer to outsiders.  Allow assets from other social networking sites to be imported into facebook, and allow facebook profile info to be exported to others too. Kind of like a universal avatar – a concept that has been discussed here and in the blogsphere. If facebook is truly going to become the new platform within the internet platform, they need to do this. It will also make it easier for marketers to reach and provide relevant messaging to a targeted audience. Sweet.  

3) Stop being so darn self-centered. I’m talking to you. Yes you. Your entire facebook profile is about you. You only add applications that improve your social standing through karma points, bragging about travel destinations and competing for the most number of friends while being a top friend the most often as well.   It’s not your fault – facebook is setup to be a self-propagating self promotion tool. In the old days of web 1.0, we used to join forum communities / discussion boards. They were highly effective in community building because every time somebody added content or responded to your post, you were notified via email. Facebook NEEDS this in the worst way for their groups to stay relevant beyond the first week a group is setup.  It will never reach its potential as a true community tool until they figure out how to leverage the power of groups.  

4) Friend categorization. I know I can choose who can see my limited profile and define what that means…but that’s not enough now that facebook is more then a friends network. It’s becoming a professional network too…and scarier still….our parents are starting to come online too. Do you really want your mother to have the same access to your friends network as anybody else? Maybe you do… then maybe you are a momma’s boy too.

5) Optimize the mobile channel. m.facebook.com kicks butt. Text alerts and commands we can do through the shortcode stack are awesome too. I can go a week or more without going to the website because of it. Having said that, what’s up with only pushing 60 characters at a time on messages? I hate pressing “n” 17 times to get the full message. It may be a case of optimizing for the lowest common denominator…but why not allow us change or choose different options? I have both a treo and blackberry – i can handle more text!

6) Expand the mobile platform. At facebookcamp Toronto I asked the 400 or so assembled if anybody was developing an application specifically for mobile or ensuring their apps will work on mobile. Only one person raised their hand. You can start by allowing people to take media from their profiles (or groups) and allow them to download them to their mobile device as a wallpaper…or maybe ringtone for audio-related media. This is also a good revenue stream potentially for developers taking advantage of the new open APIs… 

I’ve just come across this link at one degree on five predictions for facebook. Check it out…and feel free to add your own wish list here!

Social networks and text messaging have changed the way people interact with each other… and now it’s changed the way bars and clubs promote their events.  Gone are the days of the promotional flyer as your principle communication device. 

A long time friend living in Ottawa reports that his promotional printing business has dropped to almost nothing over the last 7 months. Having been in the business for over 10 years, he’s seen his share of ups and downs…but nothing like this before. The reason? He reports that promoters have moved to social networking platforms (primarily facebook) and text messaging for all their outreach work.  By now we are all aware of the popularity of facebook (Toronto is currently the second largest network within facebook in the world), but did you know that we are on pace to send over 8 billion text messages this year in Canada? Last year Canadians sent 4.3 billion messages – which was three times more then the previous year!  

Besides the continued adoption of SMS and the creation of niche social networking sites or micro-sites within existing platforms, what’s next? One candidate is the eventual adoption of MMS or multimedia messaging service. Going from SMS (or text messaging) to MMS is like going from radio to TV. SMS is still the killer application for mobile marketing, but MMS is coming and could change the way we promote our events, brands, or services. Again.

Instead of sending a message with a link to a site where you can register for an event… imagine sending a VIP ticket via MMS that can be used as entry into your event, meeting, or conference? Or imagine sending coupons to mobile devices that are redeemable at your favorite retailer?

The technological barriers in sending MMS betwen carriers has been resolved. As soon as carriers introduce pricing that makes MMS affordable (much like they did a few years ago with all you can eat SMS plans), we will see another paradigm shift in how people and marketers interact with each other. This should be interesting.