The beauty of social media is that there are so many ways of doing it. To some people, this might sounds challenging, if it’s viewed as “too many things, where to start?”. If you look at from a different angel, it actually shows how social media is powerful, and can be very easy and simple at the same time. One example that I just saw while I was looking at my Facebook page:

• Target posted a simple feed to the fans “Targets want to hear what you think about our guys’ clothing selection” and there are 3 more detailed questions within the same feed.
• Within the first 12 hours of posting, it received over 250 Likes and 800 Comments!

two screenshots:

1, how this campaign shows up on my personal profile page:

2, all comments of Target wall:

Why this is so exciting:

• the cost is so low: it’s just a facebook feed. it’s so easy & quick to implement and doesn’t even require any money!
• the response is huge: look at the numbers of responses within the first 12 hours. Comparing with your traditional campaigns or research, how can you get feedback this quick?
• it’s a great way to get customer feedback: it’s almost like open ended questions. All the comments are from the Target fans and it’s great insight and valuable data!
• it’s a great way to keep the dialogue and build communities: traditional media and research won’t give user any chance to interact, but in this campaign, people can see each other’s comments - that’s the best way of building WOM

Conclusion: don’t be scared about social media. It can be simple and easy. The point is that you need to get started somewhere now!

Tags: Facebook, On the Web, Online Communities, research, social media, social network, Social network service, Twitter

You are what you clikced on, or, you are what sites you visited… this website discovery visualization tool tells you what other sites people also visited. It’s sort of like Linkedin for websites.

Below are some of my finding. Try it out youself

• Yelp’s site network: VirginAmerica is also connected with Yelp - my biggest surprise! Maybe VirginAmerica is targeting at all food networks for advertising purposes, because people use food sites especially when they are traveling? Interesting!

• Twitter’s site network: it’s all the tools that people use around twitter. The power of having API? Or a sign of improvement that Twitter needs?

• Difference between Facebook and Linkedin site networks:

It’s fun to play around with it. Try it yourself!

Tags: advertising, Application programming interface, linkedin, On the Web, Online Communities, social network, Twitter, website discovery, Yelp

As a lot of you know, I follow several companies in my library. LinkedIn is one of them.

People discuss how sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter can monitize. These sites have been trying different things to find the right answer for themselves too. One old technique is to monitize the content (hey, content is still king). LinkedIn is showing some banner ads on their more and more popular Answers pages. See my screen shot below:

Tags: content, Facebook, linkedin, social media, social network

Happy Friday!

To save time and put things in a more organized way, I decided to create some pages in this blog as my library, that captures my regular finding around the topics that I’m interested, such as Crowdsourcing, Mobile, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and China.

I update these pages in stead of writing all different small posts. Check out these pages if you are also interested in these topics

For other topics that I have more to say, I’ll continue to write as separate posts.

Tags: amazon, china, Facebook, linkedin, mobile, Online Communities, social network, Twitter

Such a funny video about Twitter:

A young man struggles against the pressure to Twitter his life away. From: “SuperNews!” An animated sketch comedy series airing on Current TV. Every Friday night at 10 PM ET/PT.

Tune in and twit it

Tags: social network, Twitter

Hitwise pulled out one piece of data analysis that is really interesting. They put the traffic numbers of MySpace and Back to School / Education together. The table shows how web, especially social web, is changing our life, our kids’ life so much:

myspace-versus-education

Tags: data, myspace, social media, social network, web analytics

I was reading my RSS news. I landed on Viewzi’s website from one article “3 Unique Search Engines of the Future“. Viewzi is being considered as one of these 3. As reading their blog, I found out one blog titled “Internal Report” written by their intern. The page gives a list of people’s profiles that the intern worked with…these profiles really crack me up…hoho…Each profile seems so real. It is a good idea to have interns to create this blog and probably only they can tell all these real stories in a fun way.

Tags: blog, social media, social network, user generated content

I really like LinkedIn’s overall approach. Yeah - I have posted 2-3 blogs about LinkedIn within a week! (full disclosure: I don’t work for LinkedIn; LinkedIn is not paying me

Now, you can have LinkedIn App on your IPhone and it looks pretty neat. It is simple and slim. They don’t try to make it fancy with a range of fancy functions, which is probably why it is a good business app. There are only four major things you can do with your LinkedIn App (you can see the pic & detailed information from ReadWriteWeb post). But it gives enough updates about your business network from 4 quick glances.

LinkedIn is really taking the lead on business applications, both on the web and on the phone. I like their approaches for several reasons:

1. Make it simple. People would rather use one thing that really get one job done quite well, even it’s small, than one giant thing that doesn’t get the job(s) done very well. LinkedIn UI, user flow, and features are all very simple. You wouldn’t feel overwelmed when you spend time on it.
2. Take small steps slowly. LinkedIn didn’t launch a lot of features at one time. They did add new features from time to time. That gives them time to test & learn, while they figure out what users really care about. They took the same approach in their web UI redesign.
3. Stay with #1 & #2. If you find something that really works for you, you might want to stay with them until you have much better approaches that worth taking the risk of trying. LinkedIn keeps being simple and making small changes graduately.

The business apps market is huge and there are not a lot of good apps for now though. If other business app providers could keep these learning in mind, hopefully we’ll see a lot more good business apps available for us. So I don’t have to write about LinkedIn 3 times a week

Tags: business app, iphone, linkedin, social, social media, social network

I went to the annual SES in San Jose today. The sessions that I went were around Social Media topic. Most of the presentations were really high level (”this is important”, “A & B should be your top priorities”…blahblah). But I don’t see any good case studies or actual numbers to show what works or not. My assumption has to be that people are still trying to figure that out.

One thing that I did find interesting is how the audience in the Social session were not so social. Every one was sitting 3 feet away from each other. Every one was typing on laptop, text messing on phones, or writing notes. No one talked to each other before, during or after the session. Come, sit and go! Now, you wonder why a lot of marketers haven’t understood how social media / marketing works. Because most of marketers don’t understand the real value of social media & social network, or they understand it, but they don’t practice it.

If you want to run social media successefully, you have to first understand the power of it and enjoy the beauty of it. Otherwise, it is hard to bring it live.

Tags: ses, social, social media, social network

LinkedIn is really doing interesting things based on their existing platform and the database they have. They just launched a new feature “Companies” in Beta this week.

I was shocked when I took a look at what they have under each company’s profile. Some features are the result of partnering with BusinessWeek. Overall, each company has one branding page within LinkedIn, not built by the company itself, but by its employees data (no matter if/how the company wants to build this brand page)…Hoho, this is getting really interesting

Some data/features related to individual users:

1. there is a company introduction section, pulling in BusinessWeek’s existing company profiling data. No big deal.
2. you can see other employees’ names within your current company and “Popular Profiles”. No big deal either.
3. what’s interesting is you can see “New Hires” & “Recent Promotions & Changes”. What? Yeah, I can’t believe this! What a bold and smart idea of user generated content!
4. “Open Jobs” is a good information source for job applicants who are interested in one particular company. No one needs to go to other job sites any more.

Some data/features related to companies:

1. what’s the most interesting one is “Career Path” - Before & After! That’s really a smart way of pulling out & analyzing job profile data! It’s definitely helpful to see the trend for each company on this.
2. “Employee are most connected to” is another interesting one.
3. “company locations” section is another way of letting the employees tell you how the jobs are distributed.
4. Some other data includes “common jobs, top schools” and “median age”, “Male x%” & “Female x%”.

This is definitely another example of showing how powerful user generated content is. Employees define what the company is! I think soon they might have salary info too, like Glassdoor.com (one company rating & review sites with salary poll).

Last two things that they are doing in the Beta version of this “Company” feature are:

1. they do allow you to Remove your profile from certain sections, like “New Hires” or “Recent Promotions” (Good for them to have this option!).
2. they proactively ask for feedback if you see anything incorrect in each company profile.

I believe that there are probably a lot more interesting things to play with LinkedIn database, and other social networking sites too! Data is the biggest asset. Good job, LinkedIn.

Tags: data, linkedin, social network, social networking