The Ten Commandments of Managing Online Communities

Julius Solaris illustrates us in the presentation below how online communities should be manage based on ten "commandments".

The 10 Commandments of managing Online Communites

View more presentations from Julius Solaris. (tags: communities profitable)

The Good, The Bad and The Skittle's Social Makeover

As you probably know by now, the rainbow of flavors (Skittles) has taken the social media in a very experimental, Modernista kind of way. I've read some very interest articles about this social media phenomenon. Some say that they are gonna burn in hell for doing something so confusing, dumb and non-sense like this. By the other hand, there are others in the crowd that are standing up giving a triumphal ovation for such a approach. Here is my point of view, the negative side of the situation:

- There is no official information about the product. I mean, I could go to the Wikipedia site and edit the actual Skittle's product information and say that Skittles is the newest product distributed by Jelly Belly.
- No filters for porn, racial, rude and obnoxious comments from some social sites involved.
- No filters for their competition products, i.e. me saying something on twitter like: I just love M&Ms... visit www.m-ms.com.
- No filters for any malicious scripting or spamming.
- The SEO of their website may be affected (I would love to hear some comments from experts about this).

Like everything in life, there are two faces of the coin, so lets bring the good side from all this and what they are probably thinking with it:

- The expectation campaign is tremendous. What do they have under their sleeves? What is the next step? A new product? A stunning web 3.0 website? What? What?
- They are interested in what their clients, consumers, have to say about their product/brand.
- We can see a social media campaign acting live. How fast and easy can a product impact social media users.
- Branding through word of mouth. Everybody has something to say about this new Skittle's website. Skittles here and Skittle there!
- Cheap website and ad campaign. I mean, they are not really spending a dime here.
- Since traditional online advertisment (websites, banners, video spots) can be ignored, they are using a non traditional way that canít be ignored.

Whether you love it or hate it, this strategy is making noise in the business and social world and its gonna be interested to find out what is next.

What is your thought about all this?

New Facebook Pages and Other Product Updates

Facebook held today a press conference webcast to discuss the new Facebook Pages. Mark Zuckerberg along with Director of Product, Chris Cox, and Product Manager, Peter Deng participated in the 2 hours webcast. One of the main features they revealed, among other product updates, were the new Page's format. Read the complete coverage here.

Do you think this new Pages will replace traditional Landing Pages?

Oodle's Launches Today A New Classifieds Product On Facebook

Today Oodle is announcing its new classified product on Facebook, which will replace the old Marketplace application. One special feature in this new version is that classified listings can be posted for free. In an attempt to make it more social, Oodle's marketplace is taking a "conversational" approach to classifieds listings. Check the complete review here.

Social Games: Success Comes With Player's Status?

I remember the days when traditional games were all about the playing experience; mind blowing visual graphics, cool sound effects, real life situations, etc. With the success of social media games, comes a big question, what makes them successful? Is it the fact that users can publish through their profile status what game are they playing and how good they are?

My answer would be yes! The profile status becomes a billboard that let other people know about the game activities you are on. And this works as a "word of mouth" kind of advertising. The ease of recommendation given by the network's structure allows users to discover games and get involve in them. Plus, add the attention that they receive when high scores and other game facts are shown to the rest of their friends. It might work as a motivator for other players. Have you ever feel motivated to play a social game because a friend's profile recommendation?

Fliggo - Create Your Own Private Youtube

If you ever wanted to have your own "private" Youtube site, now it is possible with Fliggo. It is a social site, financed by Ycombinator, that allows users to create their own site to share videos or video blogs.

With just a few steps you can have it ready:

- Create your account- Choose a name (name.fliggo.com)
- A site description
- Choose if you want: a site to share videos, a video blog or just a simple video site for others to watch- Invite your friends!
- Change your site's appeareance

You can watch demos at: Videomathtutor.fliggo.com and Dota-allstars.fliggo.com

The curious thing about Fliggo is, why would anyone like to create a video site, if there is already a Youtube on the market? Well, probably your business would like to have an internal channel in your company's intranet to share videos among your workers. You could also create your online advertising video library to share with our colleagues. Or you could also have your design video tutorials in a website to share with the rest community. Or simply for the fun of it!

What is your opinion about this new social tool? Would it work for you?

Virgin Goes Facebook Connect

Virgin announces its new Virgin.com website. It includes many social features that allow their audience to interact with the content published in various sections. Since Virgin is encouraging its users to interact, they revealed that they are working with Facebook Connect application for their planes. “What if you could send a drink from the Virgin website to your friend on the plane using Facebook Connect?” hinted Virgin’s Alex Hunter today at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami. Hunter is the Head of Online Marketing for the Virgin Group.

In theory, you will be able to do things such as:

- People could find their friends on Virgin flights and send them virtual gifts in real time
- Travelers could find their friends on the same flight and try to get seats next to them when checking in
- Virgin could provide a myriad of deeper travel application experiences for its customers

This Facebook Connect implementation will be the beginning of new social experiences when flying.

Do you think other airline companies are going to take advantage from this type of applications?

Banner Blindness

Well, right now it might be hard for you to see any banner ads in this page, since I still don't have any, but I must say that banner blindness is a strange phenomenon among visitors surfing around millions and millions of websites that deliver banners to their audience. So, what causes banner blindness? I found this interesting very old article (a 1998 article) on internettg.org, that explains with a series of experiments this human behavior against online advertisement.

Read the complete article here.

Do you think this kind of behavior also affects Google Adsense? Are you blind to banners?

Facebook Connect vs Google Friend Connect

On Thursday night, Facebook announced the launch of their first social widget for Facebook Connect. It is a comment box that lets publishers enable comments from Facebook users on their site, and in turn, have those Facebook users publish the comments back to their Facebook profiles and share them with their friends.



And there is no secret that Google has its own service, Google Friend Connect, which is also open to everyone. But which one is better and easier to use? Lets take at look at both services and review some of their features.

The Key Difference

As we know, both services let you create applications on your website to allow users to interact with the site and their friends by logging with their respective profile accounts. The main difference here, is that Facebook is a social network, while Google Friend Connect is open to any service or site that uses OpenID for identification. For example, with Google Friend Connect you can log in with your Gmail access, meaning that you don’t have to be part of a social network at all in order to use it. On the other hand, Facebook Connect is useless for anyone who is not a user in Facebook.

It’s All About the Marketing

Facebook is a 120 millions members social network. And there are millions of services out there looking to establish engagement with this audience. Therefore, a comments tool can help them do the job.

Easy to Use

Both services require a snippet of code in your site. As far as I know, anyone can add Google Friend Connect to their site, however, adding Facebook Connect apps take a bit more of an effort. It seems like FB’s processes are more oriented to developers, rather than casual users. This could be a big turn off for people with no technical knowledge.

Have you try one of these two services? Is there anything you would like to share to this post? I will like to hear your point of view.

Why Do I Need a Social Media Department in my Company?

“Now that you mention it… well, I don’t know!” And probably you are still thinking, “I mean, we already have a marketing department, a public relations department, a sales department, a creative department and so on…” Nowdays, companies are trying to figure out where should the social media duties fall under. But why should it fit under a particular department? It wouldn’t be better to create a separate department focused exclusively on its development and understanding?
Social media is becoming a powerful and valuable tool that helps companies understand the relationship between the customers and there products. So, if it is so important for your company’s growth, don’t you think a social media department would work better with its own separate team, strategies and budget? The answer is simple… yes! It should work as a separate entity and to make it clearer I will give some advantages:

1. An specialized department has the time, dedication, knowledge, interest on social media strategies and trends. They eat, sleep, breath social media, therefore they will always be on top of it.

2. Centralization of social media information. Having one specific place where other departments can find efficient and effective data to developed strategies based on it.

3. It is easier to measure budget and goals for different departments.

4. As we mentioned above, the relationship between customers and products is very important and one of the main tasks of a social media department is to strengthen it in a 24/7 regular basis.

5. Other departments have their own separate goals, therefore, the efforts on social media ones are not handle as they deserve. Creating a social media department will solve this issue.

This are the most important advantages of having a social media department. What do think?