The Business Web 2.0
As CEO of business-based social networking site WeCanDo.BIZ, read my take on the role Web 2.0 technologies can play helping businesses to grow.
Tuesday 14 July 2009, 5:56 PM
The risk that Social CRM will exclude small businesses
The CRM 2.0 train is gaining steam, but most of its first uses are of little relevance to small businesses. Might they get looked over by one of the most exciting business web iniatives ever?
Anyone who reads my blog posts will know I'm a big advocate of Social CRM: the coming together of social networks with Customer Realtionship Management system to provide businesses with a wealth of data never before available. I've called the union 'The Perfect Business Application'.
So it's been very exciting for me to watch an increasing number of established CRM vendors -- the latest of which is Microsoft with its Dynamics CRM offering -- start to offer various degrees of integration with social networks and other social media. Micosoft's announcement comes within a week of Salesforce.com and Social Media Monitoring experts Radian6 announcing a tie-up to help bring a view of the Social Web into the leading cloud-based CRM system.
In addition to these established CRM players making their applications more "socially aware" there are also companies coming at the challenge from the other end; CoTweet is an application that enables workflow and task assignment to be attached to Twitter activity, making it easier for a team of people to 'tweet' through a single corporate Twitter account. It could provide particularly useful making Twitter-based enquiry handling scalable.
But I have concerns. Most of the ways I hear the benefits of Social CRM being discussed is in the context of helping to drive conversation about brands, either from a marketing or customer service perspective. The idea of most of these unions is that you can be there when people across the Social Web discuss your company and products, helping to drive the conversation or manage negative publicity.
I understand these benefits, but I just don't believe many small businesses find conversations being had about their company or products -- that's the problem. They're too small for this to be a problem; the real opportunity for them with Social Media is as much about winning new customers as it is serving existing ones. Their "brands" aren't known, so what is it they use Social CRM to follow exactly?
And that's when I get frustrated, because I just don't hear enough being said of how Social CRM might help companies market better and sell more. Rather than searching for conversations that might be going on across the web that could affect reputation, how about using the wealth of free specific customer insight that's being shared to better market to those customers online and offline?
Think about this: as much as you might ask your customers or target market what they like and what they want, few ever answer and those that do can give you skewed answers. But that sort of information is available across the Social Web as those same customers update their profiles; post, tweet, StumbleUpon and Digg. Your customers are revealing aspects of their needs that they'd never bother sharing with you directly, but by knowing where they are online a whole heap of additional information can be at your fingertips before you contact them; helping to drive the dialogue you have before they've even started thinking about your company, let alone discussing it.
By attaching CRM records to social identities, you can build a profile that sigificantly advances what you know about your customers and how you market to them. Using all the contact methods at your disposal, not just social media, you can build a need rather than wait for them to chirp up online before you chip in and interrupt their conversation in attempt to ensure they say only nice things about you.
This is the sort of use of Social CRM that small companies can most benefit from, as most simply won't find their companies being discussed -- they just aren't well known enough.
Why aren't we hearing more about this use or the opportunities in Social CRM for SMEs?
Your thoughts and comments are always very welcome.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
Anyone who reads my blog posts will know I'm a big advocate of Social CRM: the coming together of social networks with Customer Realtionship Management system to provide businesses with a wealth of data never before available. I've called the union 'The Perfect Business Application'.
So it's been very exciting for me to watch an increasing number of established CRM vendors -- the latest of which is Microsoft with its Dynamics CRM offering -- start to offer various degrees of integration with social networks and other social media. Micosoft's announcement comes within a week of Salesforce.com and Social Media Monitoring experts Radian6 announcing a tie-up to help bring a view of the Social Web into the leading cloud-based CRM system.
In addition to these established CRM players making their applications more "socially aware" there are also companies coming at the challenge from the other end; CoTweet is an application that enables workflow and task assignment to be attached to Twitter activity, making it easier for a team of people to 'tweet' through a single corporate Twitter account. It could provide particularly useful making Twitter-based enquiry handling scalable.
But I have concerns. Most of the ways I hear the benefits of Social CRM being discussed is in the context of helping to drive conversation about brands, either from a marketing or customer service perspective. The idea of most of these unions is that you can be there when people across the Social Web discuss your company and products, helping to drive the conversation or manage negative publicity.
I understand these benefits, but I just don't believe many small businesses find conversations being had about their company or products -- that's the problem. They're too small for this to be a problem; the real opportunity for them with Social Media is as much about winning new customers as it is serving existing ones. Their "brands" aren't known, so what is it they use Social CRM to follow exactly?
And that's when I get frustrated, because I just don't hear enough being said of how Social CRM might help companies market better and sell more. Rather than searching for conversations that might be going on across the web that could affect reputation, how about using the wealth of free specific customer insight that's being shared to better market to those customers online and offline?
Think about this: as much as you might ask your customers or target market what they like and what they want, few ever answer and those that do can give you skewed answers. But that sort of information is available across the Social Web as those same customers update their profiles; post, tweet, StumbleUpon and Digg. Your customers are revealing aspects of their needs that they'd never bother sharing with you directly, but by knowing where they are online a whole heap of additional information can be at your fingertips before you contact them; helping to drive the dialogue you have before they've even started thinking about your company, let alone discussing it.
By attaching CRM records to social identities, you can build a profile that sigificantly advances what you know about your customers and how you market to them. Using all the contact methods at your disposal, not just social media, you can build a need rather than wait for them to chirp up online before you chip in and interrupt their conversation in attempt to ensure they say only nice things about you.
This is the sort of use of Social CRM that small companies can most benefit from, as most simply won't find their companies being discussed -- they just aren't well known enough.
Why aren't we hearing more about this use or the opportunities in Social CRM for SMEs?
Your thoughts and comments are always very welcome.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
Tuesday 7 July 2009, 10:38 AM
Could "Fremium" social media evolve into a pay once unlimited access model?
I read with interest an article on TechCrunch revealing that the free Google Apps that everyone was so excited about a couple of years back have now been hidden to new users, who are now channeled towards the paid for version of the same if they visit the Google Apps website (more at http://ow.ly/gEST).
The "freemium" model, where users get access to most of a web services features for free, but where the best bits have to be paid for, is getting a lot of coverage currently as the way in which the web can make money where advertising isn't working -- read most social networks. It's worked well for porn sites in the past; business social network XING makes its money that way; Plaxo is moving to the same model by charging users for its useful Outlook contacts sync feature from the end of this month. It's been mooted -- and denied -- as a model for Twitter too.
So it comes as no surprise that Google has always made the all singing, all dancing version of Google Apps, the internet giant's equivalent of Microsoft Office, available under the freemium model. But should we be surprised that they're now doing their bit to conceal the fact that the free version still exists (here: http://ow.ly/gETX)?
Well perhaps not. But the whole thing got me thinking about what's likely to come after freemium...
Anyone who has been using the internet for any length of time will remember that we started off paying for each minute we were connected to the internet over dial up access. Then people like AOL changed that to a fixed fee every month for unlimited access. Then Freeserve came along and offered it free. Then broadband appeared and we went back to a fixed fee but up to a point, over which if you used it more you got charged. This will exists, but many other providers over a fixed fee for an unlimited service.
Home phone bills have followed the same sort of pattern; and mobile phones the same. It's not a million miles off the model used for cable/satellite TV subscriptions. It's something we all accept and are used to. I am questioning whether, as more and more sites look to charge their users a fee for premium access to features, the potential exists to pay a single fee for premium web usage which would give unlimited access to all subscription/fee-based websites?
How would it work? Well, one could log in through a single site which handles the billing and then provides direct access to the services we've paid for. If we stray outside of the sites we've paid for unlimited access to to other chargeable sites then we could be prompted to add that to our sub service for a small additional premium (or if we upgrade to the next level and open up access to a collective of other sites too). As such models exist away from the web, it's not beyond the wit of man to deploy a system for ensuring each of the destination sites offering the premium services get their share of the single subscription fee.
Hey, I could even imagine site owners doing deals on the margin that "portal" site would make if it directed users towards their services.
All we need is a company that is already used as an web point of entry; can handle taking payments; knows about redirected traffic to other sites; and has a method for enabling a single identity to be use across the rest of the web. Something like the Google supported OpenID or Facebook Connect for example...
Google could do this in an instant of course, but it's Facebook that is keener to turn revenue from its membership and the fact that so many of its 200 million users have it as their homepage.
Have I unearthed a revenue model for them that's win/win?
Your comments welcome, as ever.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
The "freemium" model, where users get access to most of a web services features for free, but where the best bits have to be paid for, is getting a lot of coverage currently as the way in which the web can make money where advertising isn't working -- read most social networks. It's worked well for porn sites in the past; business social network XING makes its money that way; Plaxo is moving to the same model by charging users for its useful Outlook contacts sync feature from the end of this month. It's been mooted -- and denied -- as a model for Twitter too.
So it comes as no surprise that Google has always made the all singing, all dancing version of Google Apps, the internet giant's equivalent of Microsoft Office, available under the freemium model. But should we be surprised that they're now doing their bit to conceal the fact that the free version still exists (here: http://ow.ly/gETX)?
Well perhaps not. But the whole thing got me thinking about what's likely to come after freemium...
Anyone who has been using the internet for any length of time will remember that we started off paying for each minute we were connected to the internet over dial up access. Then people like AOL changed that to a fixed fee every month for unlimited access. Then Freeserve came along and offered it free. Then broadband appeared and we went back to a fixed fee but up to a point, over which if you used it more you got charged. This will exists, but many other providers over a fixed fee for an unlimited service.
Home phone bills have followed the same sort of pattern; and mobile phones the same. It's not a million miles off the model used for cable/satellite TV subscriptions. It's something we all accept and are used to. I am questioning whether, as more and more sites look to charge their users a fee for premium access to features, the potential exists to pay a single fee for premium web usage which would give unlimited access to all subscription/fee-based websites?
How would it work? Well, one could log in through a single site which handles the billing and then provides direct access to the services we've paid for. If we stray outside of the sites we've paid for unlimited access to to other chargeable sites then we could be prompted to add that to our sub service for a small additional premium (or if we upgrade to the next level and open up access to a collective of other sites too). As such models exist away from the web, it's not beyond the wit of man to deploy a system for ensuring each of the destination sites offering the premium services get their share of the single subscription fee.
Hey, I could even imagine site owners doing deals on the margin that "portal" site would make if it directed users towards their services.
All we need is a company that is already used as an web point of entry; can handle taking payments; knows about redirected traffic to other sites; and has a method for enabling a single identity to be use across the rest of the web. Something like the Google supported OpenID or Facebook Connect for example...
Google could do this in an instant of course, but it's Facebook that is keener to turn revenue from its membership and the fact that so many of its 200 million users have it as their homepage.
Have I unearthed a revenue model for them that's win/win?
Your comments welcome, as ever.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
Thursday 16 April 2009, 5:38 PM
OpenSocial - the key to making social networks really useful?
Two announcements on the same day make me think that OpenSocial could help advance CRM 2.0 and make social networks much more useful to marketers.
I am a big fan of Google Alerts. I have about 30 different alerts set to keep me up to speed on news articles across my industry and those that touch it and the most interesting articles on social media in business I put out on Twitter (@wecandobiz by the way).
Today a couple of articles caught my eye: one on hosted application vendor Zoho moving to support OpenSocial across all their apps; the other on business focused social network XING adding some features or other, but mentioning at the bottom of the press release that their next big update is to better support OpenSocial.
(OpenSocial crash course, courtesy of Wikipedia: OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google along with MySpace and a number of other social networks. Applications implementing the OpenSocial APIs will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them, including features on sites such as Hi5.com, MySpace, orkut, Netlog, Sonico.com, Friendster, Ning and Yahoo!.)
You'll know I am a big advocate of the integration of social networks with CRM systems, because it means you can build contacts on networks and then manage them effectively in the best place for the job. But I'd forgotten about OpenSocial -- mainly because hardly anyone talks about it a year on from everyone talking about -- and how it could easily enable the features of CRM to be accessible from within the social network itself. I'd always assumed that the CRM system would be where the stuff is done and that the data would get pulled over from the socnet.
Now I'm looking at it the other way round, it makes sense to add the functionality to the networking site. With both Zoho and XING announcing their allegiance to OpenSocial on the same day, could we see a version of XING with Zoho CRM embedded usurping Salesforce.com's attempts to link with Facebook as the best proper demonstration of CRM 2.0 yet seen?
It's also interesting to note that Salesforce.com has said it will support OpenSocial, as has XING's US-based rival LinkedIn. The permutations are getting interesting.
But there has never been any shortage of talk. Who'll be first to actually show a workable integration Social CRM solution?
As an aside to this, I was interested to read a research paper from TAS Group and ES Research this week entitled "The New Social Media: Do They Enable B2B Selling?" It's findings? It suggests that social media isn't yet "prime time" in helping sales teams win B2B deals. It goes on to suggest that sales methodologies and CRM are the most effective tools those sales teams can have.
(I have made edits to the above paragraph with the benefit of the insight that Dave has brough us below -- my apologies for any confusion.)
(You can find the report at http://www.thetasgroup.com/news/ESR_Research_2009.pdf)
I am totally sold on the second part of this, but I don't think social media perhaps got a fair hearing. ES Research assessed the usefulness of a number of large social networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo and LinkedIn, but I see each of them as personal networks, even if the person is in business. On nearly all of those networks the individual persona is presented over a corporate one, meaning that is isn't as easy to find out about companies that members work for, or those companies' needs, as is required to properly progress B2B sales. I admire the objective of the research, but they were looking in the wrong place for their answers.
With a network that is specifically aimed at B2B type companies, with representatives on the site focused towards helping achieve the aims of those companies, and social media starts to be a whole lot more interesting. But that is obvious; then it is built for purpose, where the needs of the business are at the fore. Trying to sell B2B on a social network aimed at meeting the needs of individuals within its demographic, as surely all of the networks they assessed are, is like trying to sell B2B solutions to the crowd at a football game. You might get lucky, but it isn't why people are there.
I'd love to read your thoughts on any of the above.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
I am a big fan of Google Alerts. I have about 30 different alerts set to keep me up to speed on news articles across my industry and those that touch it and the most interesting articles on social media in business I put out on Twitter (@wecandobiz by the way).
Today a couple of articles caught my eye: one on hosted application vendor Zoho moving to support OpenSocial across all their apps; the other on business focused social network XING adding some features or other, but mentioning at the bottom of the press release that their next big update is to better support OpenSocial.
(OpenSocial crash course, courtesy of Wikipedia: OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google along with MySpace and a number of other social networks. Applications implementing the OpenSocial APIs will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them, including features on sites such as Hi5.com, MySpace, orkut, Netlog, Sonico.com, Friendster, Ning and Yahoo!.)
You'll know I am a big advocate of the integration of social networks with CRM systems, because it means you can build contacts on networks and then manage them effectively in the best place for the job. But I'd forgotten about OpenSocial -- mainly because hardly anyone talks about it a year on from everyone talking about -- and how it could easily enable the features of CRM to be accessible from within the social network itself. I'd always assumed that the CRM system would be where the stuff is done and that the data would get pulled over from the socnet.
Now I'm looking at it the other way round, it makes sense to add the functionality to the networking site. With both Zoho and XING announcing their allegiance to OpenSocial on the same day, could we see a version of XING with Zoho CRM embedded usurping Salesforce.com's attempts to link with Facebook as the best proper demonstration of CRM 2.0 yet seen?
It's also interesting to note that Salesforce.com has said it will support OpenSocial, as has XING's US-based rival LinkedIn. The permutations are getting interesting.
But there has never been any shortage of talk. Who'll be first to actually show a workable integration Social CRM solution?
As an aside to this, I was interested to read a research paper from TAS Group and ES Research this week entitled "The New Social Media: Do They Enable B2B Selling?" It's findings? It suggests that social media isn't yet "prime time" in helping sales teams win B2B deals. It goes on to suggest that sales methodologies and CRM are the most effective tools those sales teams can have.
(I have made edits to the above paragraph with the benefit of the insight that Dave has brough us below -- my apologies for any confusion.)
(You can find the report at http://www.thetasgroup.com/news/ESR_Research_2009.pdf)
I am totally sold on the second part of this, but I don't think social media perhaps got a fair hearing. ES Research assessed the usefulness of a number of large social networking sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo and LinkedIn, but I see each of them as personal networks, even if the person is in business. On nearly all of those networks the individual persona is presented over a corporate one, meaning that is isn't as easy to find out about companies that members work for, or those companies' needs, as is required to properly progress B2B sales. I admire the objective of the research, but they were looking in the wrong place for their answers.
With a network that is specifically aimed at B2B type companies, with representatives on the site focused towards helping achieve the aims of those companies, and social media starts to be a whole lot more interesting. But that is obvious; then it is built for purpose, where the needs of the business are at the fore. Trying to sell B2B on a social network aimed at meeting the needs of individuals within its demographic, as surely all of the networks they assessed are, is like trying to sell B2B solutions to the crowd at a football game. You might get lucky, but it isn't why people are there.
I'd love to read your thoughts on any of the above.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
Thursday 2 April 2009, 12:18 PM
LinkedIn and the one way street on social graph portability
Has a "cease and desist" notice to a niche social network inadvertently revealed LinkedIn's hand regarding the Social Web and contact portability?
I am not one to wash my dirty linen in public, but my company has been on the receiving end of a "cease and desist" notice from LinkedIn that may throw some light on its views on social graph portability; and it might explain why the professional social networking site isn't rushing to support Facebook Connect, OpenID, OAuth or any other of the data portability standards that the rest of the social web is embracing and already deploying...
It's fairly common practice on social networks to be able to fetch existing contact lists from e-mail systems and other social networks so users can connect to people they already know quickly and easily. I am sure you've seen such tools and also probably used them. Facebook offers it, so does MySpace, Twitter, Xing, Hi5, Friendfeed and even LinkedIn itself. It's normally how you start off your presence on a such sites so you have a network to start off with.
As a network for sales leads and business referrals we also offer this capability at WeCanDo.BIZ, using a third party tool also used by many of the above (from Octazen, which list many of the biggest social networks as clients on its website at http://www.ocatzen.com). The tool collects the login credentials for your webmail and then fetches your contacts so that it can match e-mail addresses with those registered on the network, automatically as them as "friends". Elegant it ain't, but ahead of the mass adoption of standards for data portability it's a method used by all.
One of the aims of Google, Facebook and others is to make the ability to move around the web with your contact list -- or "social graph" -- simpler and more secure. Such iniatives are getting there slowly, probably helped rather than hindered by some healthy competition on "standards" for doing this; the main protagonists being Facebook Connect and OpenID. Google and Plaxo recently showed a great way of connecting with your Plaxo contacts on potentially any other site with a community when they demonstrated a hybrid of OpenID, OAuth and Google Contacts at the OpenID Experience meeting hosted by Facebook a month ago. Others are looking into the same technology and the time where web users have a single user identity and a social graph of contacts which is used over and over on a whole load of different sites can't be that far away.
But in spite of a large number of movers and shakers in social networking being present at the meeting and supportive of the standards based technologies -- and many web properties are already offering limited data portability on their sites, be that with OpenID derivatives or Facebook Connect -- LinkedIn has not added any such capability to its own site yet. It's a big player in social networking so I was wondering about when it would show its intent on portability of contacts this week when we received a letter from their lawyers, which might give us the answers.
In short, they're upset that we use the Octazen tool to enable our users to fetch the e-mail addresses of their LinkedIn contacts so they can also connect with them on our site. To be perfectly clear, LinkedIn offers exactly the same functionality on its own site so its users can collect e-mail addresses from Google Mail, AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and others (if you are a LinkedIn user you can see it here: https://www.linkedin.com/secure/uploadContacts?displayWebMail=&trk=inv_webmail&goback=.cnt_false_0_0). But it doesn't like us doing it and wants us to stop.
As much as it has benefited over the past six years from its users inviting their existing contacts to connect with them on the site -- it had managed to win over 15 million users before it even had a marketing department -- it seems not to be so willing to allow use of the same tools elsewhere on the web. It is clear in its letter to us that it considers contact "scraping" to be bad and against its terms of use. It supports this by quoting some Californian statute that would appear to suggest that ALL social networks using such tools are doing so illegaly (maybe it should check out clause 5.3 of Google's terms of use at http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS?hl=en which says the same thing and which use of LinkedIn's contact importer would appear to breach).
At a time when social networks and other web giants like Google and Yahoo are attempting to tear down the walls between sites to make your social graph truly portable, LinkedIn is supporting methods for doing this where it gains e-mail addresses from the practice, but isn't so keen to see the data flowing both ways. If it succeeds in stopping us using such tools, will this mean that LinkedIn also has to stop the practice, as well as Facebook, Twitter and all others?
All this comes at a time when LinkedIn is demonstrating no more sophisticated and standards based methods for support portable contacts or unified login as an alternative to the methods is uses which it considers unsafe. It remains one of the few big social networks that seems to be doing nothing to take down the "walled garden" through use of technologies like OpenID and OAuth and trails way behind Facebook, MySpace and Plaxo in this area. If it forces all sites to stop using contact importers as we currently all use, what will happen to those sites that aren't effectively supporting standards based data portability, LinkedIn included?
Even WeCanDo.BIZ (11,000 members as opposed to LinkedIn's 30 million) will be adding support for MySpaceID, Facebook Connect and OpenID in the next month. We believe it is the future of the web and I've been blogging that view for nearly a year. LinkedIn's actions means we'll probably prioritise this work higher. But because LinkedIn itself doesn't support the standards, even then our users won't be able to bring the social graph information over from LinkedIn. This hardly seems fair when LinkedIn continues to benefit so much from its hapless users uploading their own contact lists.
I am sure LinkedIn considers its beef with us to be specific and individual, but has it inadvertently revealed its broader intentions as far as support for a truly Social Web?
I'd love to read your thoughts.
If you want to read more on the specifics of LinkedIn's issue with our contact importer, check out our site blog at http://wecandobiz.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/linkedin-wecandobiz-portable-contacts-and-data-retention/.
I am not one to wash my dirty linen in public, but my company has been on the receiving end of a "cease and desist" notice from LinkedIn that may throw some light on its views on social graph portability; and it might explain why the professional social networking site isn't rushing to support Facebook Connect, OpenID, OAuth or any other of the data portability standards that the rest of the social web is embracing and already deploying...
It's fairly common practice on social networks to be able to fetch existing contact lists from e-mail systems and other social networks so users can connect to people they already know quickly and easily. I am sure you've seen such tools and also probably used them. Facebook offers it, so does MySpace, Twitter, Xing, Hi5, Friendfeed and even LinkedIn itself. It's normally how you start off your presence on a such sites so you have a network to start off with.
As a network for sales leads and business referrals we also offer this capability at WeCanDo.BIZ, using a third party tool also used by many of the above (from Octazen, which list many of the biggest social networks as clients on its website at http://www.ocatzen.com). The tool collects the login credentials for your webmail and then fetches your contacts so that it can match e-mail addresses with those registered on the network, automatically as them as "friends". Elegant it ain't, but ahead of the mass adoption of standards for data portability it's a method used by all.
One of the aims of Google, Facebook and others is to make the ability to move around the web with your contact list -- or "social graph" -- simpler and more secure. Such iniatives are getting there slowly, probably helped rather than hindered by some healthy competition on "standards" for doing this; the main protagonists being Facebook Connect and OpenID. Google and Plaxo recently showed a great way of connecting with your Plaxo contacts on potentially any other site with a community when they demonstrated a hybrid of OpenID, OAuth and Google Contacts at the OpenID Experience meeting hosted by Facebook a month ago. Others are looking into the same technology and the time where web users have a single user identity and a social graph of contacts which is used over and over on a whole load of different sites can't be that far away.
But in spite of a large number of movers and shakers in social networking being present at the meeting and supportive of the standards based technologies -- and many web properties are already offering limited data portability on their sites, be that with OpenID derivatives or Facebook Connect -- LinkedIn has not added any such capability to its own site yet. It's a big player in social networking so I was wondering about when it would show its intent on portability of contacts this week when we received a letter from their lawyers, which might give us the answers.
In short, they're upset that we use the Octazen tool to enable our users to fetch the e-mail addresses of their LinkedIn contacts so they can also connect with them on our site. To be perfectly clear, LinkedIn offers exactly the same functionality on its own site so its users can collect e-mail addresses from Google Mail, AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and others (if you are a LinkedIn user you can see it here: https://www.linkedin.com/secure/uploadContacts?displayWebMail=&trk=inv_webmail&goback=.cnt_false_0_0). But it doesn't like us doing it and wants us to stop.
As much as it has benefited over the past six years from its users inviting their existing contacts to connect with them on the site -- it had managed to win over 15 million users before it even had a marketing department -- it seems not to be so willing to allow use of the same tools elsewhere on the web. It is clear in its letter to us that it considers contact "scraping" to be bad and against its terms of use. It supports this by quoting some Californian statute that would appear to suggest that ALL social networks using such tools are doing so illegaly (maybe it should check out clause 5.3 of Google's terms of use at http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS?hl=en which says the same thing and which use of LinkedIn's contact importer would appear to breach).
At a time when social networks and other web giants like Google and Yahoo are attempting to tear down the walls between sites to make your social graph truly portable, LinkedIn is supporting methods for doing this where it gains e-mail addresses from the practice, but isn't so keen to see the data flowing both ways. If it succeeds in stopping us using such tools, will this mean that LinkedIn also has to stop the practice, as well as Facebook, Twitter and all others?
All this comes at a time when LinkedIn is demonstrating no more sophisticated and standards based methods for support portable contacts or unified login as an alternative to the methods is uses which it considers unsafe. It remains one of the few big social networks that seems to be doing nothing to take down the "walled garden" through use of technologies like OpenID and OAuth and trails way behind Facebook, MySpace and Plaxo in this area. If it forces all sites to stop using contact importers as we currently all use, what will happen to those sites that aren't effectively supporting standards based data portability, LinkedIn included?
Even WeCanDo.BIZ (11,000 members as opposed to LinkedIn's 30 million) will be adding support for MySpaceID, Facebook Connect and OpenID in the next month. We believe it is the future of the web and I've been blogging that view for nearly a year. LinkedIn's actions means we'll probably prioritise this work higher. But because LinkedIn itself doesn't support the standards, even then our users won't be able to bring the social graph information over from LinkedIn. This hardly seems fair when LinkedIn continues to benefit so much from its hapless users uploading their own contact lists.
I am sure LinkedIn considers its beef with us to be specific and individual, but has it inadvertently revealed its broader intentions as far as support for a truly Social Web?
I'd love to read your thoughts.
If you want to read more on the specifics of LinkedIn's issue with our contact importer, check out our site blog at http://wecandobiz.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/linkedin-wecandobiz-portable-contacts-and-data-retention/.
Thursday 26 March 2009, 10:18 AM
LinkedIn changes earn wrath of Group managers
It's not just changes to Facebook that have got users up in arms; LinkedIn has been cheesing off its Group managers with updates of its own.
LinkedIn is an odd internet property. The so-called professional networking site is growing at a phenomenal rate at the moment, growth attributed in part to people joining in an attempt to help secure their career prospects while the sword of Damocles hangs above their head in these horribly uncertain times.
(Yes, LinkedIn is more than happy to benefit from potential soon-to-be-job-hunters in spite of commenting in my blog last year that it was unfair of me to call it a "job site".)
And if developing your career is your aim, then having easy access to former work colleagues and the networks of contacts they have is highly beneficial. My issue with LinkedIn, however, has always been that it is just too hard to make valuable new connections on the site, with others in your industry, those you find just "interesting", or those you feel you could buy from/sell to; LinkedIn advises throughout the site that you DON'T connect to people you don't already know and trust and this has not made building valuable new relationships any easier.
In fact, the only real place to do this has been the LinkedIn Groups area, where members can form or join groups based around common interests. Not all LinkedIn users know about Groups, but those that do spent a lot of their time there and many of the Group managers have been highly successful in building large and vibrant communities; a nice result for their considerable efforts.
One of these Group managers contacted me this week. Having built a group of 15,000 members, he feels LinkedIn's recent changes to how Groups work have taken away much of his control and replaced that with ads to earn revenue from the community he has put significant effort into building.
His anger is at the following changes:
1) Group managers can no longer access their Group's e-mail lists, taking away the ability to send regular newsletters and other correspondence to members;
2) Managers can no longer view the full member list, as they are limited to seeing only 500 subscribers. This is obviously annoying those who have put the effort into building much larger groups, of which there are plenty (I was contacted by a manger of 15,000 Group members, 97% of which he can no longer see);
3) Forced advertising onto the Group profile and other pages that the Group managers get no benefit from, as there is no revenue share. The issue for Group managers seems not to be that they themselves are making money from the Group, however, but that LinkedIn has cashed in on their hard work;
4) By removing the e-mail list download, Group managers no longer have any visibility of Group performance, giving no indication of how many new Group members are joining, churn (existing members leaving), etc. LinkedIn itself offers no reporting capabilities on such things.
In short, the little information they did have to measure the reults of their efforts and enable more effective use of the Groups through regular communication have been taken from the Group Managers who have spent nearly a year building them.
For many, the Groups feature is what makes LinkedIn worth visiting after you've found all your former work buddies and it is commonly used as a way of making new connections with a view to doing businesses. But the success of these Groups comes down to the dedication of the managers and their efforts to keep the content fresh, discussions flowing and members engaged.
In the interests of balance, LinkedIn has also added some features to Groups, the most interesting of which is the ability to display an RSS feed from other sources within the News section of the Group. I run a Group myself on LinkedIn and I have added an RSS feed of sales leads from our website to our pages. The problem is that the news items don't appear by default when you click the News tab within a Group -- you only see the manually pasted stuff there and the automated RSS feeds don't show unless you click "News feed" within that page. Not obvious for anyone looking for news updates and several Group Managers I spoke to had no idea how to add a feed, let alone find one once added (so I have written instructions, here: http://wecandobiz.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/add-a-rss-news-feed-to-your-linkedin-group/).
Without the continued support of these guys -- who have to rank as LinkedIn's biggest advocates -- will LinkedIn Groups break out beyond use by only the most dedicated site fans?
I'd love to read your thoughts and comments on how LinkedIn Groups benefit you...
UPDATE: Social Media Portal has let me know that a petition has now been started by Group Managers against the changes LinkedIn has made. You can read more on this at http://tinyurl.com/dbbhsd and sign up to the petition at http://tinyurl.com/cvzcqq.
On a separate note, I read with interest this week that France-based business-focused social network Viadeo -- a site that has always trailed LinkedIn and Xing in terms of popularity in Europe -- has acquired Chinese social network Tianji.com. This comes just a short while after picking up Indian socnet ApnaCircle. Viadeo now boasts over 7 million members.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
LinkedIn is an odd internet property. The so-called professional networking site is growing at a phenomenal rate at the moment, growth attributed in part to people joining in an attempt to help secure their career prospects while the sword of Damocles hangs above their head in these horribly uncertain times.
(Yes, LinkedIn is more than happy to benefit from potential soon-to-be-job-hunters in spite of commenting in my blog last year that it was unfair of me to call it a "job site".)
And if developing your career is your aim, then having easy access to former work colleagues and the networks of contacts they have is highly beneficial. My issue with LinkedIn, however, has always been that it is just too hard to make valuable new connections on the site, with others in your industry, those you find just "interesting", or those you feel you could buy from/sell to; LinkedIn advises throughout the site that you DON'T connect to people you don't already know and trust and this has not made building valuable new relationships any easier.
In fact, the only real place to do this has been the LinkedIn Groups area, where members can form or join groups based around common interests. Not all LinkedIn users know about Groups, but those that do spent a lot of their time there and many of the Group managers have been highly successful in building large and vibrant communities; a nice result for their considerable efforts.
One of these Group managers contacted me this week. Having built a group of 15,000 members, he feels LinkedIn's recent changes to how Groups work have taken away much of his control and replaced that with ads to earn revenue from the community he has put significant effort into building.
His anger is at the following changes:
1) Group managers can no longer access their Group's e-mail lists, taking away the ability to send regular newsletters and other correspondence to members;
2) Managers can no longer view the full member list, as they are limited to seeing only 500 subscribers. This is obviously annoying those who have put the effort into building much larger groups, of which there are plenty (I was contacted by a manger of 15,000 Group members, 97% of which he can no longer see);
3) Forced advertising onto the Group profile and other pages that the Group managers get no benefit from, as there is no revenue share. The issue for Group managers seems not to be that they themselves are making money from the Group, however, but that LinkedIn has cashed in on their hard work;
4) By removing the e-mail list download, Group managers no longer have any visibility of Group performance, giving no indication of how many new Group members are joining, churn (existing members leaving), etc. LinkedIn itself offers no reporting capabilities on such things.
In short, the little information they did have to measure the reults of their efforts and enable more effective use of the Groups through regular communication have been taken from the Group Managers who have spent nearly a year building them.
For many, the Groups feature is what makes LinkedIn worth visiting after you've found all your former work buddies and it is commonly used as a way of making new connections with a view to doing businesses. But the success of these Groups comes down to the dedication of the managers and their efforts to keep the content fresh, discussions flowing and members engaged.
In the interests of balance, LinkedIn has also added some features to Groups, the most interesting of which is the ability to display an RSS feed from other sources within the News section of the Group. I run a Group myself on LinkedIn and I have added an RSS feed of sales leads from our website to our pages. The problem is that the news items don't appear by default when you click the News tab within a Group -- you only see the manually pasted stuff there and the automated RSS feeds don't show unless you click "News feed" within that page. Not obvious for anyone looking for news updates and several Group Managers I spoke to had no idea how to add a feed, let alone find one once added (so I have written instructions, here: http://wecandobiz.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/add-a-rss-news-feed-to-your-linkedin-group/).
Without the continued support of these guys -- who have to rank as LinkedIn's biggest advocates -- will LinkedIn Groups break out beyond use by only the most dedicated site fans?
I'd love to read your thoughts and comments on how LinkedIn Groups benefit you...
UPDATE: Social Media Portal has let me know that a petition has now been started by Group Managers against the changes LinkedIn has made. You can read more on this at http://tinyurl.com/dbbhsd and sign up to the petition at http://tinyurl.com/cvzcqq.
On a separate note, I read with interest this week that France-based business-focused social network Viadeo -- a site that has always trailed LinkedIn and Xing in terms of popularity in Europe -- has acquired Chinese social network Tianji.com. This comes just a short while after picking up Indian socnet ApnaCircle. Viadeo now boasts over 7 million members.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
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