Why a Facebook Like Has Very Little Effect

Facebook recently made an earnings announcement showing that they are making significant progress in generating revenue.  As reported here by Forbes, Facebook said fourth-quarter net earnings jumped more than eightfold from a year ago, to $523 million, and importantly mobile ad revenues constituted 53% of overall ad sales.  An impressive set of numbers.

I find it unusual now to find a brand without a Facebook page.

The discipline of social media marketing is still underdeveloped however, partly due to the fact that the success metrics are not clear and as obvious.  What makes a success?  Someone seeing a post, reading it, liking it, sharing it?  What ROI are advertisers looking for when they run a Facebook campaign?

In an interesting article just published entitled, "Brand Comparison Study: What's Really Happening on Facebook?", Thomas Baekdal looked into the engagement patterns of 8 brands over the past two years to try and unpick what trends if any could be found.

It really is a fascinating article, albeit someone inconclusive.  I'd recommend any digital marketing specialist to read it as it will probably challenge many assumptions.

One key takeaway is that the more brands and publishers use Facebook, the more people like each brand, the less chance there is of any given brand getting a share of visibility.  It becomes more difficult to get the attention of users the more users there are and the more brands there are.

The graphs below show views per unique dropping over two years.



And - remarkably (well done Facebook) - page likes per unique reach are up during the same period.

Baekdal goes on to go into some detail and helps us to realise that a "like" is not enough.  What really matters in social media marketing is if people talk about your brand in a positive way, for example, recommending your products or talking about their experience with their friends.

He says, "You need to get people to talk about you, because just liking your posts on Facebook has very little effect."

Those "likes" are just the tip of the iceberg and actually don't mean that much. They might make you feel good and make your corporate ego shine.  Just like in the real world, what matters is not how many people know you or say they like you but how many say good things about you behind your back.

That's tricky to measure and it's why social media marketing measurement has some way to go.

How To Be Number One In Google

At last!  After 10 years of trying, I can now say I am number one in Google.

No, I am not some boiler-room SEO sales guy.   Yes, I do have an ego.

Search for "David Norris" and you get me as number one.  Well, you do if you are me, today, from the UK.  Who knows if this is a Google A/B test.

Joking aside, this is a clear sign that Google are taking on Facebook and building a social strategy.  What better incentive to get people to complete their Google profiles than to provoke their ego.  "Want to be number one in Google for your name search?  Get your profile up to date".

I noticed this because I was checking Google Analytics for the traffic to my Google blog (Blogger) and saw a spike in traffic yesterday.  I looked at the source and keywords used and saw a large number of searches for my name delivering traffic.

I did the name search and saw the screenshot above with my name number one with my Google profile with an "edit" button. (Of course! Because I have a Gmail account).   As I use Picasa and Google Contacts, my profile is starting to become very integrated.

It's clear, Google are in battle.  Let the games commence!

Restaurant Marketing Post-Recession

Where can you get great restaurant marketing advice?

Before the recession it was boom-time in UK restaurant-land. Lots of celebrity chefs, lots of new exciting concepts, lots of new openings. Pubs went gastro. There were more seats available at more tables serving more great food.

Then there was the recession. Restaurants could no longer get bank funding. New openings slowed to a snail's pace. Diners thought twice about dining out. Food inflation. Vouchers became common place. It was a triple whammy; higher costs, lower revenues, lower demand. Ouch!

Some smart restaurants have survived and thrived, through ruthless attention to their proposition and adapting their marketing to the new world.

Next up we have VAT being increased to 20%, unemployment coming from the public sector. The tough times are not over yet.

If you're a restaurateur looking for inspiration and advice to thrive in the internet age, you should check out Abbie Hanks' latest post from theblackboard.net, it's a great restaurant marketing blog with loads of tips and tricks, from SEO to social media to website optimisation and everything inbetween.

In hard times, invest in marketing.

London Restaurants: Ignore Foursquare.com At Your Peril

A new social network just hit London: Foursquare.com.

Already big in the US, I am willing to stick my neck out and predict that this will develop faster in London than swine-flu.

If you're just getting your head around Twitter, you'll need to step one step further to "get" Foursquare. Once you do, I think you'll realise this has huge potential, as a network phenomenon and as a marketing tool.

The basics.

OK - so you log into Foursquare.com and create an account. What next? You invite others to join and be your "friends" (just like Facebook). You then download the Foursquare app to your smart phone. Ready.

Now, you are on the move, you go out in the evening, and when you arrive at a place (bar, restaurant, concert venue, event, coffee shop, whatever), you "check in". On your phone you simply load the app, it uses the phone's location to identify known venues in the area and you select the one you're at. Simple as that. Then - you can see which of your other friends are also there. Maybe there's friends that are out on the town that you didn't know were out on the town. You decide to hook up on the fly.

Here's the bit you need to pay attention to if you are a restaurant.

First of all, make sure you are listed. The initial list of London restaurants is seeded by WCities, and there's loads missing. Once logged in you can add your place in the "add things" link in the menu. If you're listed, people will be able to "check-in" to your venue easily.

Secondly, there's a competitive element to FourSquare. The person who checks in the most to a venue becomes that venue's "mayor". This person is your most loyal Foursquare customer. They will be visiting you a lot.

This means that you can create a loyalty scheme on this platform. "If you are our mayor, simply present your phone and you will get a free drink". As people to compete to become your mayor, you get mentioned in a whole Facebook / Twitter universe and your brand awareness soars. It's all online and it's all free.

Sounds far fetched? Maybe this year it won't be, but I can see this becoming big for a certain demographic. Huge. The future is just around the corner.

Here's a useful blog post on how to get the most out of Foursquare.com as a user.

Why I Stopped Tweeting

In February I asked myself the question "To Tweet Or Not To Tweet?"

For 3 months I embraced Twitter and evangelised it's benefits. I tweeted several times a day every day until one day I stopped. Completely. I even went to the trouble of removing every tweet from my timeline.

Why?

It's taken several weeks to figure out but there are several reasons;

1) The catalyst was a blog post that I read called "Why Twitter Is Evil". Ironically I found this post via Twitter. It was this post that got me thinking.

2) I had always seen my Twitter account as an experiment. I wanted to understand how individuals and companies were using it socially and  commercially.  In my line of work I need to know. I now felt sufficiently knowledgable on how all worked and I'm impressed at the power of the network to pull reach and build reputations.  My learning curve had slowed.

3) Maybe I have Adam Smith's genes because I take a view that many things in life are some kind of economic transaction. Inputs and outputs. You put effort in (or money, a proxy for effort) and you get a reward (or not). Twitter was consuming a lot of time and energy versus the return (knowledge, contacts) that I was getting.

4) Information overload. I'm a busy guy with a large family and plenty of things to cram into every day. There's only so much information I can take. It's invariably limited in depth. I,be realized I'd rather spend 30 minutes reading one quality article in a magazine or a newspaper than dip into 20 trivial tweets hoping to find a nugget.

But really, it's mainly a survival tactic. I either do something well or not at all.

So long Twitter.

Twitterquette - Good Manners For Twitter Users

14 etiquette tips for Twitter

It's 2 months to the day since I started using Twitter.  During that time I've gone from a complete novice to gaining some experience and starting to learn from that experience.  Like any new communications channel that humanity discovers, it takes some time for us to develop social etiquette (in this case "Twitterquette").  We start to develop a sense of right and wrong and our own little set of do's and don'ts.  

Examples;

• Don't talk loudly for long periods of time on your mobile phone on public transport.
  
• Don't speak on the telephone at the dinner table if you have guests.
  
• Don't sent large volumes of email to people you don't know to sell Viagra.
  
• Do reply to people if they take the time to write you a letter / email / leave a voicemail.
  
• Do credit the source of your story when writing a new article.
  

So how about Twitter?

Twitterquette - version 1 (after 2 months, March 2009, UK)

Here are some tips I'd recommend that new Tweeters think about when using Twitter.

Notice that most of them are relevant to all forms of communication, not just Twitter, I just explain to detail relevant to Twitter.

Twitter is a continual conversation that you can dip in and dip out of.  It's like a 24 hour party.  You can stand on the sidelines and watch, you can entertain or you can introduce people.  Just like any social event, understanding the unseen social rules will help you have a great time.  Bear in mind who is at your party.  Are they work colleagues, industry aquaitances, or true friends and family?  Who is following you?  Who do you want to follow you?

My experiences (and advice) are around the assumption that most of the people following me are mostly work-related.

So, here we go...

1. Give credit where credit is due

If you read a tweet that you like and want to tell others, rather than just plagiarising the source, use a "Retweet" to pass the message on.  The syntax is as follows;

RT @username message-content

2. Say thank you for a referral

If someone re-tweets one of your tweets, send them a direct message to say thank-you.  They are more likely to do it again if you say thank you. 

3. Keep 1:1 conversations to direct messages

If you are having a conversation that is only relevant to you and the recipient, rather than use the public timeline to do so, use the direct message feature on Twitter; especially if it's a conversation that will last several tweets.

4. Don't hog the bandwidth

Just because someone follows you, it doesn't mean they want to receive 30 tweets a day from you and have you dominate their feed.  There are a few people that I follow that send out so much trivial mush that I am now going to unfollow them.  Clearly there's a balance somewhere.  I've found (personally) that I can take 5 to 7 tweets a day from 1 person before I start to turn off. 

5. Ask for favours, but do so sparingly

If you have a good following, you can use that to your advantage.  You can for example ask people to RT (retweet) a message if it's that important to you.  It is is a great way to build traffic or awareness.  However, I got a little annoyed by a blogger who was constantly asking people to "digg" his latest article just so it would hit the first page of digg.com.  In real life we give favours and receive favours.  It's a balance that if upset means you take advantage of goodwill and lose some of that goodwill.  Just like real life, use your network & friends sparingly, for what's important.

Tip; if you want to have your tweet retweeted, leave enough characters spare so that the RT @username will fit in without truncating the message.  For me that means working to 120 characters, not 140.

6. Cite your source

If you didn't write something, don't pretend that you did. Cite your source (as in using a re-tweet) or make it obvious that you didn't write the content.

7. Recommend others

If you like following someone, why not recommend them?  On Twitter, there's a custom of doing this on Friday and including the #followfriday hashtag to explain what you're doing.  

An example; #FollowFriday @cindyalvarez (for product management nuggets of wisdom), @thetafferboy (for SEO tactics), @manne (for restaurant news)

8. Be positive

No-one likes a drainer.  Sure, get things off your chest if you have to but do so with humour.  Don't burden the world with your worries and troubles.  Share love, not trouble.

9. Add your own content, don't just re-tweet

Some users are great at finding good material on a topic and then just re-tweeting it.  A few twits that I follow do this, and I follow then because they are consistent in being fast and frequent in their subject niche.  Generally though, I appreciate a few original thoughts as well.

10. Follow others that follow you

If someone follows me, I generally check them out by looking at their bio and their tweetstream.  If I am sure I would not be interested I don't follow.  Otherwise I follow and if it turns out later it's a waste of time, I unfollow.  If in doubt, follow.

11. If something pleases you, say so

See a tweet that makes you laugh, smile or gets you interested in something.  Now and then it's nice to reply to the source and just say so.  It will make the source feel rewarded for making the effort and will more likely continue to feed you in the future.

12. If you want someone to follow a link, tell them why they should bother

As most links in Twitter are shortened, and as so many are posted each day, take the time to describe the destination content and why it's interesting.  

13. Stay on topic

You need to decide who you are.  Are you a corporate voice or are you an individual?  Are you using Twitter for your current job, for your (general professional life) or for personal stuff only.  Decide and decide quickly.  Then, decide what areas of interest you will post on and stick to it.  People that are interested in those areas will follow you. 

14. Be real

I do like to hear the occasional snippet of non-work related stuff, even if I follow you because of your professional interests.  Think: if you go to a professional networking event; no one jumps straight into work, there's always some related chit chat about sport, the weekend or what's in the news.  Too much personal stuff becomes trivial, but it is always nice to see something of the person behind the machine.  I find a 75% work interest / 25% non-work interest is a good balance in the working week and vice-versa at weekends.

It seems to me that the first rule of Twitter is therefore NOT always to answer the question "What are you doing?".  Great Twits are much more subtle.

You can follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/davidcnorris.  

(My interests are; ecommerce, marketing, restaurants, product management, cycling, skiing, movies.)

Other blog posts that I've found on the same subject:

Twitterquette 101, Part 1: Why your tweets turn people OFF!

10 Twitter Etiquette Rules

Twitter: Decoder ring and twitterquette

Microblogging And Lifestreaming - An Overview

A friend at work, Magnus Hultberg, put together this excellent overview of some of the latest "micro-blogging" services available. I asked if he would mind if I could reproduce it here and he kindly agreed.

Magnus writes...


"A current Internet trend and social network primer... Facebook, MySpace and Bebo are so last millennium.

For an interesting overview of how Team Obama used services like this in conjunction with networks like Facebook, Orkut, AsiaAve, Blackplanet and so on to drive fan base and leverage their own web site and all their digital communication, see this PDF:
blog.guykawasaki.com//OBAMA%20SNA%20Strategic_1.pdf

I am playing around with a lot of these micro blogging services right now. Two other very hot trends because of all of this mobile tweeting from Blackberries, iPhones and normal phones (almost all phones have a Twitter or a Jaiku app for on the go micro blogging) are location tracking (where are you in the world) and identity management (where are you on the web), parts of which is often refereed to as “lifestreaming”.

Brightkite, as I mentioned, is one of the most known location in the world services, another well known one that is up and coming is Fire Eagle (a Yahoo service).

www.brightkite.com , fireeagle.yahoo.net

When it comes to online identity management it is just a fancy expression for aggregating all you do online using APIs and RSS feeds to provide users with one central hub where all information they push out can be found, and verified as coming from them. Profilactic is a well known one, Friendfeed another. In these days of people using lots of online services distributed in the “cloud” that today is the Internet the need for such services are getting more and more apparent.

www.profilactic.com , www.friendfeed.com

Taking it one step further is Chi.mp, which does proper identity management in the sense that if you sign up for their service (still invitation only) you actually get what is called an Open ID which is a standard for authenticating you in any web site (as long as the site is integrating with the Open ID API of course). Portable online identity, one user name and password everywhere. Included in the standard is functionality to, as you sign in with a site the first time, decide how much of your personal information you want to share with them and if you want to do so one time only or indefinitely. Very interesting, and certainly something that potentially will be a big part of the future.

I am at manne.mp.

Geekier than most, I am of course using my personal web site to aggregate all of this stuff.

www.hultberg.org

To Tweet Or Not To Tweet?

So, my experiment with Twitter has started.

Twitter is either going to be the biggest Internet phenomenon of this year (think YouTube in 2006 or Facebook on 2007) or I will eat my hat. Well, it will be IF the tipping point is reached. Quite what this tipping point is I'm not sure, but when enough people get absorbed into it's crazy ways then it might just be a hit. It's been around for a while (I've been aware of existence for over a year anyway), but more and more famous people seem to be using it and celebrity endorsement never hurt any product, even strange social networking sites.

Might be a hit? Well, the great thing about Twitter is that not only can you track what your friends are up to, but you can also track the celebs. One of my favorites so far is Lance Armstrong, but plenty of others including the newly elected Pres of the US have a Twitter feed.

So - how does it work? Simple. If you know the "status update" tool in Facebook, imagine that, all by itself. Just status updates, and nothing else. You are meant to type in, in no more than 140 characters (that's one sentence or two), the answer to "What are you doing now?". Then, you select friends or other people you want to follow and they get added to your page so that when you log on, at any time you can see what they are up to. Kind of bizarre, strangely addictive.

According to Hitwise, Twitter traffic has grown by 984% in the UK in the last 12 months. That is fast fast growth. The tipping point might be coming soon.

Why do it? I really don;t know the answer to that. Everyone will have their own reason. If you get something out of it, you'll come back. If that something is keeping up with mates, colleagues or heroes, you sometimes need to give to receive.

This century, enabled by the Internet, one-to-one communications and business will take off. The Internet is the ultimate middle-man. Who needs Hello magazine when Jonathan Ross will tell you what he's up to in real time?

To Tweet or not to tweet? You decide.

Tips:

Use the TwitterBerry application to view or edit "Tweets" on the move

Use www.tinyurl.com to create short urls to save text

Use www.ping.fm to update your status on your different social networking sites at the same time

How Much Should I Get Paid?

Increasingly, employees want to make sure that they work on a good team, and on the winning team. It's not enough to get a great job title, a fancy office and a big salary.

Good people need to work with good people. Success breeds success.

Personally, I believe in really working hard on getting the right people on board. If you recruit well, everything else follows. However, it's not just about you finding a person to do the job well. The best candidates need to find a company and team that they really want to join. It's a marriage every time you hire. If done well, the divorce rate is low (few people leave).

So, I was very interested to see a website that is helping prospective employees find out about prospective employers. It's called glassdoor.com.

Sign up to the site and you can rate your current and previous employers. You can also find out salary ranges for each company by job type. The catch? To read reviews or to see salaries, you need to add a review or leave your salary details.

If this takes off, we could have a free, easy to access salary benchmarking service. Working out whether you get paid the market rate becomes easier and easier. HR teams will have a cheaper source of compensation data for benchmarking. Asking for a pay rise though will still be nerve racking.

I'm cautious. I certainly won't be posting my current salary or giving feedback on my current company, mainly because there's only one of me (COO) and so it'd be pretty obvious who left the comments. I would probably leave comments on previous employers though, given that the risk of getting into a comprimising situation is lower.

It's defintely one to watch. I think it will take off in the UK simply because we're so nosy about each other.

In the long term it could change the job market in that workers will have a totally transparent view of what it is like to work for a company before joining them. That can only be a good thing: employers will create a reputation by actually being an effective organisation, not by marketing HR hype.

Court Says You Don't Own Your LinkedIn Contacts

From Telegraph.co.uk...

"A former employee of recruitment firm Hays has been ordered by the High Court to hand over business contacts built up on his personal page of the social networking site LinkedIn...

...Mark Ions, a "middle ranked" consultant operating in Leeds, Newcastle and Edinburgh, allegedly used his LinkedIn network to approach clients for his own rival agency called Exclusive Human Resources, which he set up in May last year, three weeks before resigning from Hays Specialist Recruitment.

Mr Ions' solicitor told the court that Hays encouraged his use of the site and that once Hays' contacts accepted his invitation to join his network they ceased to be confidential as they could be contacted by anyone in his personal network.

Mr Justice Richards last week ordered Mr Ions to disclose his LinkedIn business contacts requested by Hays and all emails sent to or received by his LinkedIn account from Hays' computer network.

Mr Ions was also ordered to disclose all documents, including invoices and emails, that showed any use by him of the LinkedIn contacts and any business obtained from them."

This is a groundbreaking case and for anyone involved in sales, commerce or business development, it provides case law that should be noted.

If you use your LinkedIn network, during working hours, on your employer's IT network, for the purposes of soliciting business from your employer, you should be aware that in the eyes of the law, the fact that you use a "personal" email account, this doesn't let you off the hook.

Employment law is what it's always been - designed to protect employers from rogue employees - and the law just caught up with the latest technology.

The Ego Has Landed

Another day, another new social networking site invite in my inbox.

Naymz.com... is this Linkedin Version 2? What a crappy name. It's sounds like "waynz wurld". Anyway, I'm test driving it at the moment, simply because it gives me yet another link to my blog therefore might just help with the SEO. You never know.

Enough cyncicism. It could just take off because it hooks into that perfect incentive mechanism: the ego.

Here's how it works: I link to loads of people. They link to me. The more people that link to me and endorse me, the bigger my reputation (and ego I guess). As you grow in stature, you gain points. Top tier users (rating 9 and 10) get a free Google promotion.

Let's see if it booms or dies. One to watch.

Review: Flock, Social Firefox In A Box?

Is Flock really a new web browser?

Flock, a new browser that is built around "social" browsing, is an interesting alternative to the mainstream Internet Explorer and Firefox.

It pitches itself as a "social web browser"

Actually, you could argue that it's not a new browser at all because it's built on Firefox technology. Look closely and it's really just Firefox with a skin. It's a mash-up. A good one.

Firefox has been successful because of all the custom "add-ons" that you can choose to use according to your needs. If you a developer for example, there's great tools to help check code, optimise for SEO, and many more. Firefox has succeeded in this area because it has an open source development community that continuously add to the features available without adding weight to the basic browser. You can download the basic version which doesn't have too much complexity and just add on the bits that suit you.

Flock however could be seen as a "social Firefox in a box". Take all the great web 2.0 add-ons for Firefox, package them up in a neat user interface, and it actually looks like a different product.

What sort of features do you get?

Neat sidebar options, for example for your favourite RSS feeds

Add feeds by just clicking an icon in the address bar

People sidebar: If I sign into my Facebook account, all of my friends appear in my sidebar with easy to access actions such as send a message

A clean homepage "My World" that includes your favourites, your feeds, favourite media

Web clipboard, so you can copy as store snippets from useful web pages

Instant blog posting from your browser

Coming soon: webmail in the browser

Yahoo! search in installed by default, there's tabbed browsing. It's all good.

Well, it's good to a point.

If I only used one computer and one web browser, I could easily see myself being a fan of Flock. The trouble with Flock is that you need to configure the browser on each machine you download it onto. So - say now I start getting all of my favourite RSS feeds in one place, I have to do the same thing again on each browser that I download and configure.

Also, I have to work for a living. Going to a web browser pre-loaded with a whole load of distractions isn't great for productivity.

I can see myself using Flock at home and Firefox at work. To keep my favourites in one place I'll probably still use Google bookmarks, that way I can access them on any machnine. If I had a Flock account where I could store all of my settings in one place, now that would be better.

It goes to show: in the future, any successful software needs to be truly portable.

It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know

How recruitment is changing to use social networks and "Web 2.0" technology to source candidates.

The recruitment business has always been about matching supply and demand. Candidates and Employers.

In the old days, this would involve newspaper and magazine advertising to source potential candiates. Then along came the internet, which allowed for three important changes:

1. Aggregation of supply
Websites sprung up that posted jobs from many different employers and agencies, allowing for a one stop shop for candidates.

2. Employer direct advertising
With the internet employers can advertise directly themselves with ease and source lots of candidates with a simple online listing.

3. Candidate driven demand
Candidates can search for jobs using search engines. This allows employers and agencies to advertise using paid search (e.g. Google Adwords) to fish for candidates that were stating their interest.

There have been a few winners in this first round of the internet revolution. A good example is Monster.co.uk, a jobs listing site that when I checked last had over nearly 2000 jobs in London for just one sector: IT/Software Development.

HR Managers and the recruitment industry have adapted to this new world. Can they adapt to what's coming next?


Get A Haircut And Get A New Job

The next round of change is being driven by online social networks and "web 2.0" (community driven) applications.


Here's 5 examples of what's coming next...

What connects them all is that increasingly we will be referring each other for jobs and sites will facilitate this.


1. Niche Community job boards
Specialist communities have built up over the last few years. Owners of these sites realise that their audience might be interested in jobs in that sector. An example that I've found to be successful was http://www.e-consultancy.com/jobs/ which is an online marketing and ecommerce resource. I posted a job here for just £99. I only got a few candidates, but one of them was the one we hired. Result.


2. Linkedin.com - professional networking site
Linkedin is a networking site that allows you to keep in touch with your professional contacts. It's like an online contacts list that is automatically kept up to date. There's over a million users in the UK. By my calculations, there's probably only 200,000 that are "power" users.

Anyway - linkedin has job ads. As an employer I can list a job for only about £100 (Monster is about £500). What's clever is that when a user logs in, jobs in their "network" are shown. I've found many of the jobs advertised that I've seen when I log in to be highly relevant: they're in the right sector and are interesting job roles.

What's also clever is that if you apply for a job, Linkedin will tel you how you might be connected to someone at the hiring company. You know "John Smith" who knows a "Jane White" at "Company X" where company X is the job opportunity. It gives you a chance to knock on a few doors, ask John to have a chat with Jane to find out more about the job, put in a good word for you. The power of a personal introduction is always and will always be a useful door-opener.


3. Facebook pages and applications
Facebook has a number of jobs applications. Companies are trying to find one that works. I'm not sure that Facebook is the right place for job hunting, but lots of companies have tried to make it work.

There are two main types of applications: "refer a friend" and "search for a job". The trouble is with the "search for a job" type applications is this: why would you want a "David added the search-for-a-job application" message to appear on your profile, especially as so many of your "friends" are probably your colleagues. Who can you trust these days?

Refer-a-friend type applications are potentially interesting, but the whimsical nature of Facebook means that it doesn't lend itself to a decent referral audience. If you are going to refer a friend you need to put some effort into it. See Zubka.com, below.


4. Zubka.com - referral reward site
This is a very interesting start-up and it's private equity backers are the same guys that backed eBay, Betfair and Bebo.

Zubka’s approach is that a user will log on to their website, see a job that they think that their friend may be interested in, and make a referral. If the friend gets the job, the user gets a fee. The fees are substantial. For a £50,000 role, the referrer stands to make £3,600 if the candidate is successful. That's a pretty big carrot. It does require some effort from the referrer, but not too much. 10 minutes work could land you a couple of grand.


5. Notchup.com - get paid to interview for jobs
Taking things one step further is Notchup.com. Let's see if this one works out, but it sounds interesting. Here, you register and employers can invite you for interview.

What's great is that they PAY YOU to go on the interview. How great is that? According to their "interview calculator, I'm worth $610 an interview. Could be worth an afternoon off? I haven't really test driven this site myself, so I'd be interested in feedback from anyone that has.


So - what success have you had with finding candidates or jobs through community based websites?

I'd be interested to know. Comments welcomed....

Portabilty Of The Social Graph: Google's new Social Graph API

One of the trends to look out for this year online is the "portability" of the Social Graph.

The Social Graph is a term used to describe the mapping of relationships between people. Many of us have relationships on well known social networking sites such as Facebook and Linkedin, as well as more obsure forums and specialised communities.

In terms of usefulness, to be able access these relationships is a great starting point for all sorts of website applications.

What's really needed though is a way to be able to get a "meta" view of all of these relationships so that you don't need to declare them all everytime you land on a new site. I don't really want to maintain 20 different "friends" lists when I only really have one set of friends. (OK, some contacts aren't friends, and some friends are not in contact online, but the point is that mapping out these relationships time and time again can be tedious).

Wouldn't it be useful if a website already knew about my contacts and suggested relevant useful topics according to my contacts and interests? What if say, website X knew that I was already "friends" with my friend on website Y and suggested that we connect on website Y as well? I might not know that my friend also uses website Y, and so with a simple prompt we could find each other.

It all sounds a bit big brother right?

Well, our masters of the universe, Google, are having a go at solving this problem in the form of the Google Social Graph API.

How does it work?

Quite simply it gives developers tools that can analyse the links to and from the from any public "profile" page of a website and start to infer from the links who is connected to which networks.

For those of you who know your HTML, there is an anchor tag attribute "rel" which can be used by social sites and blogs to clarify further the type of relationship.

For example if I were to link to this blog from one of my sites I would write [a href="http://www.david.norris.co.uk" rel="me"]. The rel="me" attribute says that the site I'm linking to is one of my sites.

This is just one way that Google can read the link patterns to identify relationships.

Trying it out

Google offer a couple of example applications that show how the API can be used.

One of these is called My Connections. Here I entered 3 of my sites in the input box; this blog, my linkedin profile and my Gooruze profile.

On clicking "My Connnections", the script analysed the links between those sites.

Here's the link: http://socialgraph-resources.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/samples/findyours.html?q=www.david-norris.co.uk%2Bwww.linkedin.com%2Fin%2Fdavidnorris%2Bwww.gooruze.com%2Fmembers%2Fdcnorris.

It can tell which of the my "claimed" sites can be reached from each url.

Interestingly it found out that I had put in livebookings.net as one of "my sites" on Linkedin. This is the website for the company for which I work. It then identified a possible connection of another site that links to one of mine "claiming" to be me. This was www.linkedin.com/in/hultberg, which also links to livebookings.net.

This is because www.linkedin.com/in/hultberg is a linkedin page from a colleague at livebookings who also put livebookings.net as his company site on linkedin.

Will it catch on?

For Google, more accurate mapping of the Social Graph will require that websites enable the code in their links from profile pages to contain the REL attribute or other methods of categorising links out.

If anyone can encourage the uptake of new coding habits, Google can.

The question is
- will we reach critical mass of enough sites using these attributes so that relationships can be correctly inferred from the links?

We'll see. In the meantime, this is clearly a strategic effort by Google to have some control over how the Social Graph is made portable. Whoever cracks this nut is going to have significant advantage in the next phase of the internet's growth.

Will The Real Facebook Please Stand Up?

Right wing, neo-conservative, big brother....

A ruthless attempt at global domination?

The Guardian's Tom Hodgkinson tells us what he really thinks of Facebook's investors in this enlightening rant. Worth a read.

Make up your own mind:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

Yahoo Email and the Social Graph

One of the big stories this year will be how the "social graph" becomes liberated from destination sites such as Facebook.

I am current a "member" of at least 5 to 10 online networks of significance to me, from LinkedIn, to Facebook, to my local cycling club, not to mention my Skype list, my email contacts and my IM contacts.

Many of my contacts exist in all of these lists, some in one but not another. My "social graph" is actually still quite fragmented.

It would make sense therefore to liberate my networks from these applications and sites and allow them to be used across ANY online community that I want to be a part of. I would just need to be able to tag the status of a contact as being a friend, a professional contact, a family member or anything else I want. Then I could drag a tagged list to any application on any device. That's where we need to get to.

In order to do so, someone, somewhere is going to figure out
1. How to extract the social graph from the applications
2. Make money from doing so

Google's strategy in this area is with it's "Open Social" project. Facebook has Facebook, Microsoft has MySpace.

Yahoo are hot on their heels.

Yesterday at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show), Jerry Yang from Yahoo presented Yahoo's ambition to become the start point of choice for consumers by adding social networking power to Yahoo mail (currently the world's largest email supplier with over 250m users).

Yang said. “At Yahoo we want to be most essential starting point for your life,” and “take the complexity of the Web and simplify your life through very powerful technologies.”

The new Yahoo user experience will centre on Yahoo Mail and will integrate email, social context, tagging and a whole host of "Web 2.0" features.

The "Friends" in the Facebook world are just your "Contacts" from your email address lists. Based on the frequency of your contacts, email can be ordered in terms of social importance rather than say date.

3rd party apps can be accessed in the same interface giving the opportunity for friends to collaborate

Yang an example of planning a dinner. You would drag the thread into a map and it will bring up the profiles of those on the mail, note preferences (for food in this case) and suggest restaurants in the area. You can also take an email message, pop up the profiles of those on the message, takes an address from email and show it a map.

That's great. A collaborative decision making tool for a group of people to book a restaurant.

However, wouldn't it be even better if the social graph required to do this were not hard-wired into Yahoo. Or into Facebook for that matter?

Surely the application "restaurant booker" should be platform neutral and could exist on the web, on a desktop, on a mobile or a TV, and that the social graph that powers the "connections" would be transcendent and available for any developer to use.

Maybe, if Yahoo opened up their social graph to as an API for developers to use (and maybe charge a tiny fee to make it worth their while), we might have what we need.



News source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=7503, by Dan Farber & Larry Dignan

The Long Tail Of Social Networks

The long tail distribution curve of social network usage.

Two things came together this week.

Firstly, I was reading Chris Andersson's excellent book - The Long Tail, which if you haven't read it a must read. He quite clearly explains what the effect of lowering distribution and production costs have done to modern day retailing and the related success of ecommerce businesses. One point he makes is that the when the cost of distribution is low, the spread of available inventory increases.

Secondly, I came across an excellent site that graphically represents the social graphs of on-line communities and social networking sites. http://orgnet.com/community.html by Valdis Crebs shows how most networks have a core of heavy, dedicated users, a second group that are loosely connected and a large outer ring of "disconnected nodes, commonly known as lurkers". He notes that communities have various levels of belonging and contribution.

The graphical representation by Valdis Krebs seemed to me to be an indication of a Pareto distribution of usage. That's to say that the highest intensity of usage comes from the smallest proportion of users and that the lowest intensity of usage comes from the highest proportion of users. I had also heard the same pattern described by a friend who was researching her MBA project on online communities.

So I asked myself the question: can I test to see if social network usage has a "Long Tail"?

To see if this was the case, I ran the numbers from my LinkedIn network. (For info: If you are not a member of LinkedIn, it's a free to join professional networking site).

I looked at all of my 227 connections to see how many connections each of them had. From Valdis' observations I expected to see that there would be a very few "highly connected" users and exponentially more users that had fewer connections. What I wanted to see however was whether the resulting chart would result in a Long Tail distribution curve.

My reasoning was: given that it was free to join, there are zero "costs of distribution" - therefore I would expect to see a "Long Tail".

Sure enough, there were only a few top end users. On Linkedin, once you go over 500 connections it displays as "500+". So the top end of the pattern is slightly distorted in that not all of the 500+ users will have the same number of connections. Some will be in the 500's, but I imagine that one or two might even reach to 700 or even 900. In total there are only 6 users with 500+ connections (out of 227).

What about the bottom end of the scale? It turns out that just over half are low usage users. 115 people have less than 50 connections.

Here's what it looks like if you break it down:

Connections	People	% of total
500+	6	3%
201-500	12	5%
101-200	40	18%
51-100	54	24%
1-50	115	51%

If you plot it on a graph, the "Long Tail" curve is most definitely evident:



The curve extends right out to the right where there are 8 users with just 1 connection. These are people that I invited to join my network, who accepted, but have done nothing since. They have not added their own connections. Note that there are more people in this category than there are those with 500 or more connections at the other end of the scale.

Of course, I have only plotted the data from one network, for one node (me). It would be interesting to know if other networks also follow the same pattern.

Despite my limited analysis, I'm pretty convinced that most online social networks and communities will display similar Pareto distribution curves. This is because there is no barrier to entry. There is no cost to join a network. It's free. Therefore, it's no big deal to join up, trial it out and see if if you find it useful. There are no costs in extending the tail.

I assume therefore that I'm probably in the top 10 to 15% of users of LinkedIn and therefore most probably one of the "core" users as described by the graph on orgnet.com.

However, if I consider my half-hearted efforts on Facebook, I'm definitely not in the core. I'm probably floating around "loosely connected" in the bottom half of the curve. (As are, I expect the majority of registered users).

Conclusion? Everything so far points to a long tail distribution curve of social network usage.

Tripadvisor, Facebook and Restaurants

Restaurant reviews on Facebook with Tripadvisor.

Towards the end of last year, Tripadvisor launched a Facebook application called Local Picks.

As I write this, on Tripadvisor there are 252,835 restaurants worldwide and 823,248 reviews already written.

Wow. That's a lot of restaurants and a lot of reviews.

So... is it any good?

Well, according to Facebook, there are 25,297 daily active users. I noticed however that this is down from the 100,000+ daily users that they were gaining a few weeks ago. I guess that's partly down to the holiday season. Also, it could have had a wave of adoption and is now slowing to a natural plateau of stickiness. Personally I can see myself using it once in a while, but not every day. I mean, I eat out a fair amount, probably once a week, but even that wouldn't warrant a daily visit. Maybe once or twice a month.

Anyway, I thought I'd add it to my Facebook account and try it out.

• Is it easy to start using?
• Is it easy to add a review?
• What about restaurants that are not already listed?
• How significant is the social angle?
• How useful is it for choosing a restaurant?
• Can I book online?

Is it easy to start using?

Overall, it's pretty intuitive. The design is simple and easy to use. Nothing too flashy or complex. Nice. The only think that threw me is that although it recognised my hometown to be London (from my Facebook profile), it still set the default map view to be Boston, USA. Once I'd saved my settings and re-started the app from the menu, it got it right.

So - I get a map of London and a list of top rated restaurants listed below it. I couldn't really see much on the map. There were apparently 1690 restaurants in London, although only the top 20 show on the map. Also, the map markers were a discreet grey (not the usual red I expect on a Google mash-up). I figured out after a while that you need to zoom in to see the detail. I mean, if you had 1690 map markers, there would be no map left!

I zoomed to my local area and saw 4 restaurants. I know for a fact that there are about 20 restaurants in our area. 20% coverage is OK, but it still has a way to go.


Is it easy to add a review?

Yes - very easy. All you need to do is to rate the restaurant on a scale of 1 to 5 stars by clicking the star. You can also choose if this is a "Favorite" (Shame - why can't they use "Favourite" for us Limeys?), and whether this is a place you "Want to go". You can also add free text.

As with all questionnaires, the more detailed the questions, the lower response rate, but the better quality of data. Conversely, the easier the questionnaire, the less meaningful the data. In this case, because you can just rate a restaurant and not leave a comment or state the reason why, it's difficult to know why a restaurant does so well or does not do well.

I should think that a rating for a business lunch would be very different to a rating for a night out with friends, a family lunch, a romantic date or a pre-theatre meal. Speed of service, childcare facilities, wine lists, atmosphere, food quality and choice - these all matter to greater and lesser extents depending on the occasion.

In terms of adding a review - yes - it's very easy. Too easy maybe?


What about restaurants that are not already listed?

I wanted to add a review to a restaurant that I enjoy visiting regularly, but found that it was not listed.

I could enter the details of the restaurant, starting with the name and the address. In my example the address was not recognised from the postcode, so I had to manually pinpoint the location on the map. There were a couple of other screens to go through after the address screen.

I was all set add my review. Too bad then that I now have to wait 24 to 48 hours before restaurant is added to the listings.


How significant is the social angle?

Right or wrong, I trust my friends more than I trust the rest of the unknown folks in the world. So - if I can get reviews from my friends for restaurants, because I know them, what they like and who they are, I can "trust" their reviews more than an anonymous user. Good idea then.

To be honest I'm not a heavy Facebook user. I don't have that many "friends" registered and only one of those has the application on their account. However, the idea seems to make sense. Every time I am shown a restaurant review, it shows me the reviews from "everyone" and from "friends".

My reviews are added to a page called "My Picks". My friends "picks" are listed on a separate page.

For the social angle to really work, all my friends that I regularly eat out with would need to add this app to their profile and we'd all need to rate restaurants as we visit them.

I really doubt that many Facebook users actually use it in this collaborative way.

Still, it makes sense that you start off using the app by yourself, get reviews from the wider world and then as your friends start using it, get their opinions too.


How useful is it for choosing a restaurant?

Say I just use the app to help me find restaurants. How useful is it?

On all of the three primary filters (Geographic, cuisine and price, see below), you then get to see restaurants listed by highest rated (either by friends or by everyone). You can also choose by most ratings, most favorites or most want to gos.

Geographic. Well, I can zoom on the map very easily. If I want to find a restaurant near a certain place, it's great. Many restaurant search tools still could do better in this area, so top marks here.

Cuisine type. Yup, good filter here if I am after a certain cuisine type.

Price range. Shame this is in dollars for some of the restaurants in London. Because of that I'm not sure how much I trust it to be honest.

One more thing I'd really like is to be able to filter on are some of the restaurant attributes such as business, child friendly, outdoor seating, romantic etc. These are all features offered when you list a restaurant, so it would be good to be able to search by these too.


Can I book online?

Alas, no. It seems that the good old telephone still rules for most these restaurants.

Some have website links though, which is a good start.


Overall impressions

Overall, this application seems to deliver on volume and spread. Almost all major cities have a decent spread of restaurants listed. Where it lacks (I feel) as a truly useful decision making tool, is the level of detail available against each restaurant.

So, to improve?

1. Make it so you could easily rate the restaurant on a number of additional factors such as:
- menu
- service
- atmosphere
- comfort
- wine list
- value for money

2. Add further clarification on suitability for categories such as
- families
- business lunches
- romantic setting
- party atmosphere

3. Enable searches and filtering on the following dimensions
- Geographic (done)
- Price range (done)
- Cuisine type (done)
- Occasion categories (see point 2 above)
- Ratings (done)
- Sub ratings (see point 1 above)
- Friends ratings (done)

This would really create a very powerful restaurant recommendation engine.

Finally, add a facility to link to a restaurant's website or some other way of enabling a booking. Tripadvisor would want to figure out how make this lead generation pay for itself with whoever they partnered with to deliver the booking interface.

Even better, add a tool that allows friends to collaborate over the decision making for the restaurant, and once booked sends all of them the confirmation details.

There you'd have it. A truly one stop socially enabled decision making and booking system.

Good effort from Tripadvisor.

Once again, another step towards distributed, user centred content and a step away from destination sites.

Social Networking Sites Are The Fastest Growing UK Online Brands

Neilsen Netratings' recent report showed that of the 10 fastest growing UK online brands, three were social networking tools (Rock You!, Slide and Bunnyhero labs), one was a social network (Facebook) and one was a professional network (LinkedIn).

Networks arrive, take hold, and surge. They reach a tipping point where suddenly they mutate like a contagion and take over the inboxes and phones of the country. Not surprising therefore that they dominate the top 10.



However, it takes a very special network to hold out. Remember Friends United? It was the "Facebook" of 5 years ago. Now, it's history. Today's users are fickle. What is cool to this generation will be old hat to the next. So you can expect networks to rise and fall like the tide. They arrive fast, they die fast. Only the lucky few survive.

However, despite this cynicism, I must admit that it seems that the age of the network has arrived. Is it a blip in the history of the internet or an era that will last? Time will tell.

In the meantime, what to do?
1. If you are creating a network, make sure it has some real value.
2. If you are in the business of promoting your product, you have to embrace the networks, or get left behind.

View the official Nielsen release here.

The User-Centred World

I predict a move from user-centred design to a user-centred web, and eventually to a user-centred world.

Imagine a world where all of your relationships, communication, interests and interactions are wrapped into a single digital communication portal. This portal would save all of your contact details, conversations & messages, whether these be phone calls, instant messages, emails photos, videos, music & other media.

Importantly, this portal would transcend any one device and any one software or hardware provider. It would not be just on your PC. It would not just be on your mobile phone. It would not be just through your TV. It would not just be through Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! or Facebook. This portal would sync with any device that you use, at any time, for any reason.

Imagine also that this portal could interact with you in your real world as well as your virtual world. It would track your position through GPS on your mobile phone (say) and give you directions to reach your friends in the vicinity. Maybe you would exchange contact details with new contacts just by bluetooth, and this would automatically sync with your online services such as your email, blog or birthday reminders list.

Why would we want this?

Why not? The digital era is getting ever so complicated. I've lost count of how many logins I have for different sites and services. Even keeping my contact lists up to date gets a little crazy... Mobile phone (personal, work), Outlook (personal, work), social networking site A, social networking site b, webmail a, webmail b, webmail c, address book at home.

Why should I have to keep of these devices in sync? As a human being my life is being carved up arbitrarily by the fact that different companies supply me with different devices, software and services. Do I care? My friends are my friends. My family is my family, and my work colleagues are my work colleagues. Real life is not divided into mobile phone, email, IM and social networking providers.

I want to interact with the real world as easily as possible. I want to have everything in one place. That one place is ME!

YOU are the centre of your universe and I am the centre of mine. (OK, some wouldn't agree, so don't get all philosophical on me now - let's keep this simple shall we!?)

I want to interact with people I like, need or can help. I don't want to interact with the rest of the world - life is too short!

I want to interact with companies that offer me things that I am interested in. I don't want to interact with companies that are polluting my life and time with things that I don't care about.

(Don't try and sell me a bed shorter than 2 metres in length (I won't fit in it). Don't try and sell me a steak (I'm vegetarian). Don't try and sell me shoes unless you stock size 12 - you're wasting my time. However, if you offer me a DVD subscription service better and cheaper than the one I have now, I might just be interested).

Anyway - if I could interact with all these people and companies through one profile, in any place, on any device, in a way that suits me, well that would be the user-centred world.

User-centred design can deliver commercial success. I predict though that the user-centred world will be absolutely more commercially successful than our current world. It's the ultimate "long-tail" in action.

This is already happening and I believe it will accelerate over the next few years. What example trends are there in this direction?

Users requesting information (pull, not push)

Google's iGoogle (personalised homepages)

RSS feeds

Customisation of desktops in Windows Vista

Tivo TV / Sky Plus

Podcasts

Contact across multiple devices

IM on mobile phones and PC

Email on a Blackberry

Mapping relationships and sharing interests

Social bookmarking (e.g. del.icio.us, Reddit)

Social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and others)

Business networking tools (Plaxo / Linkedin)

Infrastructure

Open-source software (e.g. Linux, Android)

Open source knowledge bases (e.g. Wikipedia)

Web enabled phones

GPS

Fingerprint based payment systems

Retina scanning security systems

Wi-Fi

10 steps to the user-centred world

1. User interests will be saved against user profiles and will be updated in real time in response to user activity
2. User relationships will be saved, categorised and constantly modified
3. There will be eventually a single user profile for each user
4. User locations will be tracked in the real world as they move about
5. Profiles in the digital world will transition to real world
6. All communication devices will centre on the same user profile
7. Content will be delivered to the user at the user's request
8. Advertising will be requested by the consumer, (pull not push)
9. "Popularity" will become increasingly more important in driving brands
10. Globalisation will allow faster networking of individuals and companies in a single digital reality that is entwined with the real world

Consumer demand for simplicity and convenience will ultimately take us down this path.

Remind me to read this post in 15 years time to see if we've done it.