The Business Web 2.0

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

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/.

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

Twitter is the darling of the social media world, with many bloggers saying Google should fear it, if not buy it. But what threat or opportunity does Twitter actually pose?

Yes, yes, another blog about Twitter, the Web 2.0 service of the moment. You are bound to have heard of it; if not be sick of hearing about it. The fact remains, however, that it is enjoying stellar growth -- reputedly 900% plus over the last year, although exact user numbers are hard to determine as Twitter itself is secretive. Further, around 80% of users access the service through third party software, like TweetDeck, so don't appear on statistics showing Twitter website usage, as they go in through the API (so straight into the database rather than through the website).

This week saw Google add its own Twitter account, which has got the blogosphere wondering whether it has merely acknowledged its importance; or whether it may be circling for acquisition. Others believe that Twitter poses the biggest threat yet seen to Google's core business of search.

So what does Twitter offer that Google should be worrying about?

1) A compelling search alternative

Google owns the search market, delivering the vast majority of search results and having seen off well established encumbents such as Alta Vista, Yahoo!, Ask and Microsoft's Live Search. It has also done its bit to see companies like Yell booted out of the FTSE100. Few people can name another traditional search engine that offers a chance of threatening its hugely dominant position.

But search as Google does it is flawed. I wrote last June on the dubious value of getting 67,000,000 responses to a search query when perhaps just a few would be more useful, especially if what you get back is very much more relevant -- and by my definition, not about those who have spent a fortune on SEO.

I had a forum debate with the managing director of a business directory, a company that arguably sees itself going head to head with Google, about whose site was better: his directory or my business lead and referral site. I'll spare you the tittle tattle, but his assertion was that his site was better because if you typed "accountant" it came back with 22,000 entries. I said WeCanDo.BIZ was better because it came back with a handful, but within those you could see which of those was used and endorsed by your own business contacts. Few people actually have a need for 22,000 accountants, but if they did then his site would be better. I believe a person would be likely to choose one business over any of the 22,000 others if came with a recommendation from someone they know and trust.

You can move the same argument to Google and Twitter. I see Tweeple already asking questions of their Twitter followers that in LBT (Life Before Twitter) they would have gone to Google to post as a search query. Why do they use Twitter to ask questions now? Because someone they have a relationship with will give them a knowledgable, qualified answer to "where do I find a good accountant", rather than them having to sift through 33,900,00 (seriously!) responses to "accountant" in Google (of any other search engine for that matter).

Yes, Twitter has its own search facility hidden away at http://search.twitter.com, but there is rarely a need to use that because your network probably holds many of the answers. As I said back in June, if I want a good accountant, one name recommended by a contact is many times more useful to me that 33 million listings where I carry the risk as to how good any one of them is. Twitter is as valuable for finding out what good resturants, the exchange rate for the dong, or the name of the main character in 1970's sci fi drama 'V'.

It's power is in your answers being people powered, not matched by a bot and easy to cheat by the SEO savvy.

2) Better engagement with visitors

At this point in time I don't doubt that most web site traffic comes from Google. But what is that traffic worth? Spend any time on forums heavily populated by so-called 'SEO experts' and you'll find their currency is page rank and whether you get listed on the hallowed Page 1. But many think their job is done if you rank well on Google, with a token nod towards compelling content on your own website to draw visitors in and to get specific engagement. Even if your website is hugely engaging, what is the conversion rate for most businesses on clicks to contact? If anyone betters 5% they are doing well. 10,000 visitors a day who never contact you is worth nothing that any business can measure.

And here is a key way in which Twitter beats the old way of doing things. Visitors to my Twitter profile will make an instant decision on whether I am worth following, based not only on what I say about my own business (not all of which you could find on my website), but also what I comment on, Tweet and ReTweet from the rest of the web. They'll consider whether I can save them having to find stuff they're interested in. If they see me Tweeting enough of value then they'll follow me -- and I get one more name in my opt-in marketing list. I currently pick up ten followers a day (join them: @wecandobiz), but how long would I have to wait for my website to pick up the same number of opt-in newsletter subscribers, for example?

But being given permission to send to new followers is, literally, only half the story. Through Twitter we also have a mechanism for conversation. It is easy for any of my followers to comment on my content -- how many people reply to newsletters or fill out contact pages with thoughts, good or bad? And I also get to see what each of my followers is interested in and passionate about. Twitter can be conversational, but if you just read what your contacts share you can learn a lot about your customers, prospects, market and industry. With newsletters, this sort of stuff just never happens.

Where Twitter isn't so good

OK, it isn't perfect. It shows enormous promise as a method of driving your business objectives forward, but Twitter is too hard to use today; too disorganised. The search almost feels like it's on a different website. And many of the most useful Tweeting tools are provided by third parties that you only get to hear about once your network has started to grow. And, more often than not, each third party app does one or maybe a couple of things well, but you end up using a bunch of tools to monitor tweets, add new followers, thank new followers, schedule Tweets, automate RSS feeds as Tweets... at this point in time I use TweetDeck, TweetLater, Twitterfeed and Twollo. I use them well, but it's still four apps to maintain my Twitter presence.

But Twitter has grown to well over 6 million users, many of whom are big fans (there are business people who love it as well as Stephen Fry), IN SPITE of it being a pain in the arse to use. If Twitter went beyond the geeky "What are you doing?" focused website they launched in 2006 and better reflected the way most Tweeple actually use it, then Google would have real grounds to get worried. That needn't be a move towards 'slicker' that might alienate existing fans, but just a wizard which helps new users recognise the best way of using it (I mean, come on, how many of your Tweets are an answer to "What are you doing?" Recognise that no-one cares!), an easy way to follow and build followers; and perhaps each Tweet also bringing back details of other people Tweeting on the same subject -- ooh, a bit like search results...

I'd love to read your thoughts.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

Website owners have been watching the battle between the open standards based OpenID and proprietary Facebook Connect for over a year now, waiting for a winner. But I'm now wondering, does there NEED to be a winner?

My last post on data portability drew some interesting comments. Not only were specific implementations of OpenID defended by Kevin Marks at Google -- and I concede that there are some that are much easier to use than others, whilst providing pretty rich functionality -- but I got some interesting direct contacts.

Like many, we've been holding off implementing either OpenID or Facebook Connect until we see which solution people (site owners and visitors) are favouring; and until they also get a bit easier to implement and use. It seems I needn't have done so, however, because I got an e-mail from the guys at JanRain of Portland, Oregon, who have a solution that enables you to log in to either through a single and smart looking interface.

Their website describes well how RPX works but, in essence, they provide a hosted solution for authenticating your site users using OpenID or Facebook Connect, giving you some simple code to add to your site where your login form goes today. With just a few clicks, visitors to your site can sign up using the identity from a number of sites (Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Google Mail, AOL to name a few), or continue to register using your existing sign up process. If they come in using identity from another site, they can also bring over existing contacts from many of these and, in some instances, post back comments to the other social network. Everything that Facebook Connect can do; and pretty much all that was demo'ed by Google and Plaxo recently.

If there are other solutions that enable you to do so much so easily, I haven't yet found them. It's possible that either Google's solutions in this space or Facebook Connect will get this good in time, but who wants to sit and wait when the user benefits are there to enjoy now? And sites that HAVE taken the leap report a significant increase is user registrations.

We've yet to try JanRain RPX on our site, but I can certainly recommend it is worth a look by anyone who has also been watching the Google/Facebook battle.

It seems you can have both and that the winners can be you and your site visitors!

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz