ISDS 705 - ISMG Ch 7 - test 4
wikimasters
"garden" community content; "prune" excessive posts, "transplant" commentary to the best location, and "weed" as necessary
Blogs
(Web Logs) have grown to a point where the number of public blogs tracked by Technorati (the popular blog index) has surpassed one hundred million (Takahashi, 2008). This number is clearly a long tail phenomenon, loaded with niche content that remains "discoverable" through search engines and blog indexes
blog rolls
(a list of a blogger's favorite sites)
Folksonomies
(sometimes referred to as social tagging) are keyword-based classification systems created by user communities as they generate and review content. allow users to collaboratively tag and curate online media, making it easy for others to find useful content. Since folksonomies are created by users themselves, they are often more easily understood and embraced than classification schemes imposed by site owners.
Trackbacks
(third-party links back to original blog post)
social motivations of individuals in wikis
(to make a contribution, to share knowledge) that allow these features to be harnessed. The larger and more active a wiki community, the more likely it is that content will be up-to-date and that errors will be quickly corrected. network effects
During the 2009 Iranian election protests
, the U.S. State Department even asked Twitter to postpone maintenance to ensure the service would continue to be available to support the voice and activism of Iran's democracy advocates
Example of RSS
. Subscribe to the New York Times Technology news feed, for example, and you will regularly receive headlines of tech news from the Times. Subscribing is often as easy as clicking on the RSS icon (wifi looking symbol) appearing on the home page of a Web site of interest
Firms are leveraging Twitter in a variety of ways
: promotion, customer response, gathering feedback, and time-sensitive communication.
Wikis can be vital tools for collecting and leveraging knowledge
; reducing geographic distance; removing boundaries between functional areas; and flattening preexisting hierarchies
Process of creating and sharing podcast
A podcast publisher simply records an audio file, uploads the file to a blog or other hosting server, then sends the RSS feed to Apple
Goldcorp crowdsourcing
Along with the data, McEwen ponied up $575,000 from the firm as prize money for the Goldcorp Challenge to anyone who came up with the best methods and estimates for reaping golden riches. Releasing data was seen as sacrilege in the intensely secretive mining industry, but it brought in ideas the firm had never considered. Taking the challenge was a wildly diverse group of "graduate students, consultants, mathematicians, and military officers." Eighty percent of the new targets identified by entrants yielded "substantial quantities of gold." The financial payoff? In just a few years a one-hundred-million-dollar firm grew into a nine-billion-dollar titan. For Goldcorp, the crowd coughed up serious coin
examples of wiki use
At Pixar, all product meetings have an associated wiki to improve productivity. At European investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, employees use wikis for everything from setting meeting agendas to building multimedia training for new hires.Sony's PlayStation team uses wikis to regularly maintain one-page overviews on the status of various projects.
Examples of Web 2.0
Blogs, wikis, social networks, photo and video sharing sites, and tagging systems
online reputation management
Concern over managing a firm's online image. Firms specializing in this field will track a client firm's name, brand, executives' names, or other keywords, reporting online activity and whether sentiment trends toward the positive or negative.
key features are common to most blogs
Ease of use. Creating a new post usually involves clicking a single button. • Reverse chronology. Posts are listed in reverse order of creation, making it easy to see the most recent content. • Comment threads. Readers can offer comments on posts. • Persistence. Posts are maintained indefinitely at locations accessible by permanent links. • Searchability. Current and archived posts are easily searchable. • Tags. Posts are often classified under an organized tagging scheme. • Trackbacks. Allows an author to acknowledge the source of an item in their post, which allows bloggers to follow the popularity of their posts among other bloggers.
risks of social media for companies
Embarrassing disclosures can emerge from public systems or insecure internal networks. Employees embracing a culture of digital sharing may err and release confidential or proprietary information. Networks could serve as a focal point for the disgruntled (imagine the activity on a corporate social network after a painful layoff). Publicly declared affiliations, political or religious 7.4 Electronic Social Networks 140 views, excessive contact, declined participation, and other factors might lead to awkward or strained employee relationships. Users may not want to add a coworker as a friend on a public network if it means they'll expose their activities, lives, persona, photos, sense of humor, and friends as they exist outside of work. And many firms fear wasted time as employees surf the musings and photos of their peers.
Firms must train employees and update their knowledge as technologies, effective use, and threats emerge. Security training is a vital component of establishing social media policy. Penalties for violation should be clear and backed by enforcement.
Engagement is often more art than science, and managers can learn a lot by paying attention to the experiences of others. Firms should have clear rules for engagement and escalation when positive or negative issues are worthy of attention.
sock puppets (whole foods CEO)
Fake personas set up to sing your own praises
free rider problem
If users don't visit Twitter.com, that lessens the impact of any ads running on the site. this phrase means where users benefit from a service while offering no value in exchange. Encouraging software and service partners to accept ads for a percentage of the cut could lessen the free rider problem
feeds are also controversial
Many users react negatively to this sort of public broadcast of their online activity, and feed mismanagement can create public relations snafus, user discontent, and potentially open up a site to legal action
key influencers can also be extremely valuable
Prominent bloggers and other respected social media participants can provide keen guidance and insight. The goal isn't to create a mouthpiece, but to solicit input, gain advice, gauge reaction, and be sure your message is properly interpreted. Influencers can also help spread accurate information and demonstrate a firm's commitment to listening and learning
"four Rs": representation, responsibility, and respect of social media policy also reputation
Representation. Employees need clear and explicit guidelines on expectations for social media engagement Responsibility. Employees need to take responsibility for their online actions Respect. Best Buy's policy for its Twelpforce explicitly states participants must "honor our differences" and "act ethically and responsibly." a fourth "R" is at stake—reputation (both the firm's and the employee's). Violators should know the consequences of breaking firm rules and policies should be backed by action
Wiki forms
Software or online service.
Not all crowdsourcers are financially motivated
Some benefit by helping to create a better service. Facebook leveraged crowd wisdom to develop versions of its site localized in various languages.
advertising through Twitter
Starbucks uses it to spread free samples of new products. Dell used Twitter to uncover an early warning sign indicating poor design of the keyboard on its Mini 9 Netbook PC. Best Buy customer service, answers questions through twitter.
SMART
T, creating a social media awareness and response team. While one size doesn't fit all, this section details key issues behind SMART capabilities, including creating the social media team, establishing firmwide policies, monitoring activity inside and outside the firm, establishing the social media presence, and managing social media engagement and response.
public location sharing raises privacy concerns.
The Web site PleaseRobMe.com was created to draw attention to the potentially dangerous issues around real-time location sharing. After a brief demonstration period, the site stopped its real-time aggregation of publicly accessible user-location data and now serves as an awareness site warning of the "stalkerish" side of location-based apps
Organizations can seek to harness the collective intelligence (wisdom of crowds) of online communities
The availability of free or low-cost wiki tools can create a knowledge clearinghouse on topics, firms, products, and even individuals. The openness of wikis also acts as a mechanism for promoting organizational transparency and accountability.
winner in social media
The first site to gain traction in a given market is usually the winner.
crowdsourcing
The power of web 2.0 offers this form of innovation. "the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call"
Foursquare
The service allows players to "check in" at different locations, allowing players to earn "badges" displayed in the app for completing specific achievements
Twitter "grow-first-harvest-later"
The site's rapid rise has allowed it to attract enough start-up capital to enable it to approach revenue gradually and with caution, in the hopes that it won't alienate users with too much advertising.
Twitter made its data available for free to other developers via API (application programming interface)
Twitter users rarely visit the site. Most active users post and read tweets using one of many—often free—applications provided by third parties, such as Seesmic, TweetDeck, and Twhirl. This happens because Twitter made its data available for free to other developers
Location-Based Services
Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz are among the many social services that have added locationbased options, allowing you to tweet or post a status update attached with a physical location as determined by your phone's global positioning system (GPS), triangulation from nearby cell phone towers, or proximity to neighboring Wi-Fi hotspots
microblogging
Twitter. allows users to post 140-character messages (tweets) via the Web, SMS, or a variety of third-party desktop and smartphone applications. The microblog moniker is a bit of a misnomer. The service actually has more in common with Facebook's status updates and news feeds than it does with traditional blogs. But unlike Facebook, where most users must approve "friends" before they can see status updates, Twitter's default setting allows for asymmetrical following
bit.ly
URL-shortening services
RSS reader
Users begin by subscribing to an RSS feed for a Web site, blog, podcast, or other data source. The title or headline of any new content will then show up in this. RSS readers are offered by third-party Web sites such as Google and Yahoo! and they have been incorporated into all popular browsers and most e-mail programs.
Web 1.0 -2.0
Web 1.0 Web 2.0 DoubleClick → Google AdSense Ofoto → Flickr Akamai → BitTorrent Britannica Online → Wikipedia personal Web sites → blogging evite → upcoming.org and Eventful domain name speculation → search engine optimization page views → cost per click screen scraping → Web services publishing → participation content management systems → wikis directories (taxonomy) → tagging ("folksonomy") stickiness → syndication instant messaging → Twitter Monster.com → LinkedIn
social media or user-generated content
Web-based efforts that foster peer production. These sites include blogs; wikis; social networks like Facebook and MySpace
wiki
a Web site anyone can edit directly within a Web browser. Many popular online wikis serve as a shared knowledge repository in some domain.
wisdom of crowds
a group of individuals (the crowd often consists mostly of untrained amateurs), collectively has more insight than a single or small group of trained professionals
Mash-ups are made easy by
a tagging system called XML (for extensible markup language). Site owners publish the parameters of XML data feeds that a service can accept or offer (e.g., an address, price, product descriptions, images). Other developers are free to leverage these public feeds using application programming interfaces (APIs), published instructions on how to make programs call one another, to share data, or to perform tasks. Using APIs and XML, mash-up authors smoosh together seemingly unrelated data sources and services in new and novel ways.
RSS
acronym that stands for both "really simple syndication" and "rich site summary"). fosters the rapid sharing and scanning of information, including updates from Web 2.0 services such as blogs, wikis, and social networks. RSS feeds can be received via Web browsers, e-mail, cell phones, and special RSS readers.
The social media space introduces a tension between
allowing expression (among employees and by the broader community) and protecting the brand.
Several firms run third-party crowdsourcing forums
among them InnoCentive for scientific R&D, TopCoder for programming tasks, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk for general work.
Mash-ups
are combinations of two or more technologies or data feeds into a single, integrated tool. Mash-up authors leverage technologies such as APIs and XML to combine seemingly unrelated data sources and services in new and novel ways.
wikis purpose - Wikipedia
attempts to chronicle a world of knowledge within a particular domain. can be used for any collaborative effort—from meeting planning to project management. And in addition to the hundreds of public wikis, there are many thousand more that are hidden away behind firewalls, used as proprietary internal tools for organizational collaboration.
When brought outside the firewall, corporate wikis can
be a sort of value-generation greenhouse, allowing organizations to leverage input from their customers and partners. Intuit has created a "community wiki" that encourages the sharing of experience and knowledge not just regarding Intuit products, such as QuickBooks, but also across broader topics its customers may be interested in, such as industry-specific issues
conceived from the start as a social network for business users. The site's profiles act as a sort of digital Rolodex that users update as they move or change jobs
Organizations with a clearly established leadership role for social media can
create consistency in firm dialogue; develop and communicate policy; create and share institutional knowledge; provide training, guidance, and suggestions; offer a place to escalate issues in the event of a crisis or opportunity; and catch conflicts that might arise if different divisions engage without coordination.
Blogs, wikis, and social networks not only enable sharing text and photos, they also allow for
creation and distribution of audio and video
Feeds can rapidly mobilize populations, and
dramatically spread the adoption of applications. The flow of content in social networks is also difficult to control and sometimes results in embarrassing public disclosures
what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG)
editing that, while not as robust as traditional word processors, is still easy enough for most users to grasp without training or knowledge of arcane code or markup language. Users can make changes to existing content and can easily create new pages or articles and link them to other pages in the wik
embassy approach to social media
establishing presence at various services with a consistent name. Think facebook.com/starbucks, twitter.com/starbucks, youtube.com/starbucks, flickr.com/starbucks. Firms should try to ensure that all embassies carry consistent design elements, so users see familiar visual cues that underscore they are now at a destination associated with the organization.
most powerful (and controversial) feature of most social networks
feed. provide a timely update on the activities of people or topics that an individual has an association with. Feeds can give you a heads-up when someone makes a friend, joins a group, posts a photo, or installs an application. Feeds are inherently viral. By seeing what others are doing on a social network, feeds can rapidly mobilize populations and dramatically spread the adoption of applications. Leveraging feeds, it took just ten days for the Facebook group Support the Monks' Protest in Burma to amass over one hundred and sixty thousand Facebook members
Google Alerts, Twitrratr
flag blog posts, new Web pages, and other publicly accessible content, regularly delivering a summary of new links to your mailbox. Twitrratr will summarize mentions of a phrase and attempt to classify tweets as "positive," "neutral," or "negative
MySpace
for public consumption. Started by musicians, MySpace casts itself as a media discovery tool bringing together users with similar tastes
complementary third-party products and services that enhance Twitter's reach and usefulness
generating network effects from complementary offerings similar to other "platforms" like Windows, iPhone, and Facebook
SMART team will
hone unique skills in technology, analytics, and design, as well as skills for using social media for online conversations, listening, trust building, outreach, engagement, and response.
social media monitoring is about more than about managing one's reputation
it also provides critical competitive intelligence, it can surface customer support issues, and it can uncover opportunities for innovation 7.9 Get SMART: The Social Media Awareness and Response Team 168 and improvement. Firms that are quick to lament the very public conversations about their brands happening online need to embrace social media as an opportunity to learn more.
Mashup examples
leverage Google's mapping tools. HousingMaps.com combines Craigslist.org listings with Google Maps for a map-based display for apartment hunters. IBM linked together job feeds and Google Maps to create a job-seeker service for victims of Hurricane Katrina. SimplyHired links job listings with Google Maps, LinkedIn listings, and salary data from PayScale.com. And Salesforce.com has tools that allow data from its customer relationship management (CRM) system to be combined with data feeds and maps from third parties.
The social media team needs support from
m public relations, marketing, customer support, HR, legal, IT, and other groups, all while acknowledging that what's happening in the social media space is distinct from traditional roles in these disciplines.
Electronic social networks help individuals
maintain contacts, discover and engage people with common interests, share updates, and organize as groups.
wiki technology
makes it easy to create, edit, and refine content; learn when content has been changed, how and by whom; and to change content back to a prior state
Many firms use RSS feeds as a way to
mange information overload, opting to distribute content via feed rather than e-mail
effective social media presence offers "four Ms" of engagement
megaphone allowing for outbound communication; it's a magnet drawing communities inward for conversation; and it allows for monitoring and mediation of existing conversations
Info gathering from location based services
new way to gather and share information. In a new part of town and curious what folks are saying about the spot? Search for tweets tagged as being posted around that location. Augmented-reality apps can overlay real data on top of images from a GPS and compass-equipped smartphone. Swivel your iPhone around with Stella Artois's Bar Finder app open, and it'll point you to the nearest Stella153 Information Systems equipped watering hole
Network effects and cultural differences result in
one social network being favored over others in a particular culture or region.
oriented towards reinforcing existing social ties between people who already know each other.
peer production
perhaps Web 2.0's most powerful feature, where users work, often collaboratively, to create content and provide services online. also leveraged to create much of the open source software that supports many of the Web 2.0 efforts
wisdom of the crowd Sermo
physicians forum for advice in healthcare
rich media
professional content such as ad clips, customer support guides, music videos, TV shows, movies, and more. can be distributed or streamed within another Web site, blog, or social network profile.
similarities between wiki and blog.
public or private and value derives from both technical and social features.. network effect for wiki
firms that overreach and try to influence an entry outside of Wikipedia's mandated neutral point of view (NPOV
risk a backlash and public exposure. Version tracking means the wiki sees all. Users on computers at right-leaning Fox News were embarrassingly caught editing the wiki page of the lefty pundit and politician Al Franken
most popular general-purpose virtual world
s Second Life by Linden Labs, although many others exist. Most are free, although game-oriented worlds, such as World of Warcarft (with ten million active subscribers), charge a fee. Many corporations and organizations have established virtual outposts by purchasing "land" in the world of Second Life, while still others have contracted with networks to create their own, independent virtual worlds.
Podcasts
s are digital audio files (some also incorporate video), provided as a series of programs. Podcasts range from a sort of media blog, archives of traditional radio and television programs, and regular offerings of original online content.
blogging has its downside
s can be a hothouse for spam and the disgruntled. Ham-handed corporate efforts (such as poor response to public criticism or bogus "praise posts") have been ridiculed. Employee blogging can be difficult to control and public postings can "live" forever in the bowels of an Internet search engine or as content pasted on other Web sites
good social media policy needs to be three things
short, simple, and clear
Ranking engines, trackbacks, and comments allow a blogger's community of readers to
spread the word on interesting posts and participate in the conversation, and help distinguish and reinforce the reputations of widely read blogs.
wisdom of crowds
the idea that a large, diverse group often has more collective insight than a single or small group of trained professionals
The greater the number of wiki users
the more likely the information contained in the wiki will be accurate and grow in value.
astroturfing
the practice of lining comment and feedback forums with positive feedback
Web 2.0
these new services are targeted at harnessing the power of the Internet to empower users to collaborate, create resources, and share information in a distinctly different way from the static Web sites and transaction-focused storefronts that characterized so many failures in the dot-com bubble
virtual worlds
users appear in a computer-generated environment in the form of an avatar, or animated character. Users can customize the look of their avatar, interact with others by typing or voice chat, and can travel about the virtual world by flying, teleporting, or more conventional means.
prediction market
where a diverse crowd is polled and opinions aggregated to form a forecast of an eventual outcome. The stock market is arguably a prediction market
crowdsourcing
where initially undefined groups of users band together to solve problems, create code, and develop services, are also a type of peer production
the idea of crowd wisdom is at the heart of
wikis, folksonomy tagging systems, and many other online efforts.
wikis support the following key features
• All changes are attributed, so others can see who made a given edit. • A complete revision history is maintained so changes can be compared against prior versions and rolled back as needed. • There is automatic notification and monitoring of updates; users subscribe to wiki content and can receive updates via e-mail or RSS feed when pages have been changed or new content has been added. • All the pages in a wiki are searchable. • Specific wiki pages can be classified under an organized tagging scheme.
Typical features of a social network include support for the following
• Detailed personal profiles • Affiliations with groups, such as alumni, employers, hobbies, fans, health conditions) • Affiliations with individuals (e.g., specific "friends") • Private messaging and public discussions • Media sharing (text, photos, video) • Discovery-fueling feeds of recent activity among members (e.g., status changes, new postings, photos, applications installed) • The ability to install and use third-party applications tailored to the service (games, media viewers, survey tools, etc.), many of which are also social and allow others to interact
criteria necessary for a crowd to be "smart"/Prediction markets are most accurate when
• be diverse, so that participants are bringing different pieces of information to the table, • be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd's answer • offer a collective verdict that summarizes participant opinions, • be independent, so that each focuses on information rather than the opinions of others
