Social media has many applications for a business or organization. From complex social networks or online communities connecting factions of a brand’s audience to relatively simple corporate blogs, the environment and tools before us enable businesses, large and small, to connect with consumers in compelling ways not seen before.

We talk a good deal about individual tools, platforms and applications on SocialMediaExplorer.com. We also discuss strategies and tactics to engage audiences. But what about the enterprise? Who is there to serve the large corporations, brands and communities?

Robin Hopper is the Vice President for Business Development at Awareness, an enterprise social media firm that bills itself as the leader in the category. They offer services that provide community facilitation platforms for internal and external audiences, independent of one another or in various states of blend as well. What that means is, they build branded communities using web 2.0 tools and offer a white label solution for branded social networks. More on Awareness below.

We talked to Hopper recently to find out more about social media for the enterprise.

Enterprise social media can be interpreted a couple of different ways – strategic and tactic implications define one path, technical execution another. Do you find customers are capable in one or both areas and just don’t understand the marriage of the two, or that there’s a sufficient lack of understanding in one or both?

While we have seen an increase in the number of customers that are capable in both recently, this is still a new market with a lot of buzz so customers more often come to us knowing they need to do something with social media but not necessarily what or why. Forced to choose I’d say the majority are still in the technical execution camp because they are more likely able to articulate their need in terms of “a blog,” “a wiki,” or “needing to run a video contest” at this point

Companies wishing to explore enterprise social media solutions probably ask the question, “How does this integrate or work with my current website?” Answer that question for the executives out there reading this who are curious

We see broad integration of a social media solution with existing web properties as a key ingredient to success. One of the biggest benefits of enabling social media/community is that your members will inevitably create content gems that you will want to make available to an audience beyond the community members and such our platform provides variety of ways to integrate - these include

• Branded site: the Awareness platform can be branded to look exactly like existing properties so the fact that visitors are unaware that they are navigating between your website and your social media community.
• iFrame – Awareness can also be presented as an iframe in your existing website.
• Participation Widgets – all of Awareness participation points are available as widgets that can be easily added to any web existing website. This allows you to add web2.0-style interactivity (voting, rating, commenting, submit a story, photo, video, create a profile, etc.) to any web property and/or encourage participation in your community from anywhere.
• Content Aggregation Widgets – all of the content provided in your Awareness platform is also available as widgets that can be easily added to any existing website. This allows you to augment your web properties with the best user generated content on any topic. For example you can augment the product page of your website with customer reviews of that product or you can display the photos submitted by customers who attended an event on the event page of your main website.
• RSS – The Awareness platform RSS’s the heck out of everything… Every content category or tag has it’s own RSS feed making it very easy to syndicate content from any topic in your community to other web properties.
• Web parts for SharePoint – in addition to widgets, Awareness participation points and aggregations are also available as web parts for SharePoint allowing SharePoint customers to easily integrate them into their SharePoint powered portals.
• Awareness API – there is also a full API allowing the more technically savvy to incorporate any element of Awareness into any website.

Do you find that customers are generally focused on a certain tool or set of tools they want without regard to a strategic purpose? How do you walk them back to the discovery phase to ensure the end result is really what they need

We do. As I mentioned earlier customers are still articulating there need in terms of a tool or tactic - “we want a company blog”, “we want a discussion board,” etc., rather than talking in terms of the constituents they are trying to serve or the business problems they are trying to solve. While we can certainly deploy our platform tactically for any of those, a key part of our sales cycle is to step back and work with the client to understand their objectives, to try and draw out business problems they are experiencing that could be solved and to understand how they might measure success

Speaking of the discovery phase, are there certain tools you are finding that customers wind up needing more frequently or urgently than others

While successful communities are dependent on broad participation it would be way too much to ask of members to jump in right away and create a full profile, start a blog, or edit a wiki. Instead, customers need to think about how they can start members down a path to broader and broader participation converting them from a lurker or consumer of content to a more engaged community member. To achieve this we’ve found that customers in almost all cases need to incorporate “softer” participation points like voting/rating, commenting, and discussions to start members down that path

Classically trained marketers probably react to open conversation on their own website the way toddlers do to Brussell’s Sprouts. How do you answer the anxiety companies have about opening their virtual doors to free-flow of conversation

“You can’t leave the dinner table until you try everything on your social media plate,” doesn’t seem to cut it so we end up but we do end up talking about a walk before you run approach. Basically our application gives marketers a brake and a gas pedal so we talk about how they can introduce conversation to their websites by easing their foot off the brake rather than stepping on the gas. Extensive work flow, moderation and word filter features let them introduce conversation without the worry, giving them ample opportunity to ensure content is appropriate. It doesn’t take long for them to see the types of conversation that take place are not ones that they should fear so they usually move pretty quickly to relax the moderation features and start to step on the gas by introducing other participation points to their sites and/or address other applications through social media

If a company or brand wants to open a conversation portal on their website (a forum, message board, etc.), what are the advantages of using an enterprise social media firm like Awareness as opposed to their internal technology teams building them from the free tools available out there

All the typical build vs. buy questions apply – do you want your staff devoting the time to develop and maintain a social media solution? Can you devote the staff to support? Can your team devote the time to the ongoing enhancements and feature requests? That said there are a number of low cost/no cost point products and tools that can be a good way to test the social media waters with a pilot project

Once a pilot, or even a few pilots, starts to gain momentum however a broader integrated platform becomes almost a necessity otherwise you have to deal with piecing together like content in different blog, wiki and discussion platforms; trying to consolidate member login and profiles in different systems, etc

A platform approach such as ours is all encompassing - blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking, video/photo sharing, social bookmarking, etc. - are all included allowing you to pick and chose which to deploy to best meet the needs of your community not just at launch but as it matures. With Awareness, we actually treat all of these different social media ingredients as the same thing, i.e., it’s all just content to our platform with different attributes applied

I would imagine employee training is an imperative in the success of either an internal or external platform. What challenges have you faced or are you seeing in preparing clients to use Web 2.0 technologies

Actually, if we’ve done our job right, training is almost a non-event. By that I mean we focus on understanding the members of the community the customer is intending to serve – how technical they are, the tools they use today, the information they need to share, etc. The Awareness platform provides a broad range of participation options that include email, fill in the blank form submissions, comments, discussions, blogs, wikis, etc. so once we understand the community members, we map the participation methods that best fit to try and create a frictionless participation environment

To illustrate, one of our clients is a 100-year-old financial services company that wanted to turn on a social media community that would allow their field sales to collaborate, share best practices, etc. This group was not that technically savvy and was using email distribution lists to share information. Rather than introduce a whole new way of sharing information, we turned on an Awareness community that really leveraged our email-authoring feature out of the gate. By using the feature, community members could continue to share the information in the way they always had, the only difference is that our platform intercepted the email, formatted it and published it to the new community. Now members had a way to consume the information that was easier than sifting through email so they were naturally drawn there where they discovered that they could vote, discuss, and even contribute right from the community itself. Over time the number of content submissions initiated by email dwindled as members migrated to the new community but that was able to be a natural occurrence with zero training rather than demanding a cultural shift from the members

In general terms, how does the enterprise cost model work? (i.e. – How much is a company in for to build out a community platform? What about maintenance and service beyond build?

Awareness is primarily offered as a hosted solution. The annual subscription is $48K and includes the use of the software, hosting, maintenance, and support for unlimited users. One time costs for implementation services are dependent on the role clients want us to take vs. their agency or their own team

And what kind of time frames can enterprise customers generally expect, say with a fully functional, working internal communications platform

Depending on the complexity of the design, customers can be up in running with a fully functioning platform in 2 – 8 weeks

Are there environmental prerequisites you would want before working with a client (customer base, employee population, management understanding of the social web, etc.)? What are the ideals

While Awareness customers are from a variety of industries – travel, hospitality, financial, technology, media, retail, etc. - they are typically looking to broadly adopt Web 2.0 to solve business issues. So the platform is best suited for companies who are trying to leverage social media to engage a large number of participant communities of interest in and outside their organization

Hopper is the founder of iUpload, which became Awareness Networks. He has an extensive background in the professional services and management and document management industry. He also has extensive experience in the startup world. He blogs at hopper.awarenessnetworks.com

Awareness was launched in 2005 and is headquartered in Waltham, Mass. It is one of several reputable enterprise social media firms on the market. Others include Mzinga and Jive. Jeremiah Owyang also maintains a list of white label social networking platforms on his blog found here.

As indicated earlier this week, Crystal Peterson and I presented Thursday night to a group of young professionals associated with the Advertising Federation of Louisville. As promised, here’s our PowerPoint presentation.

While my post from Monday stirred some interesting discussion in the comments, I want to stress that the point of the presentation was not to say that human resources pros and hiring managers are out there snooping through your Facebook photo albums and MySpace profiles looking for something for which to disqualify you from job searches. Rather, many are looking for the good — are you active in communities in your industry? Do you have a blog or comment on blogs? Have you established an expertise or at least a professional reputation online? If they find the good, it helps your chances.

Anecdotally, I would also say that PowerPoint decks, as we call them in the ad business, are generally vague and useless to me. (One of my pet peeves about my industry.) So, if you have questions or would like some background on what we said to accompany the presentation, fire them off in the comments. I promise we’ll both keep an eye on them and answer any you might have

Thanks to Robin Miller from the AdFed and the folks at Glassworks for hosting the event, as well as Central Bank (disclosure: A Doe-Anderson client) for sponsoring the Career Construction Series for the organization.

I have a bone to pick with my social media and marketing brethren. Stop making fun of people because they’re on MySpace. It’s unbecoming and shows that you’re so overwhelmed with your own smarts that you’re stupid. It’s the same smugness some Mac users generate despite the fact their beloved, intuitive machines account for a whopping three percent of the personal computer market. If they’re so great, why don’t more people get it?

According to Compete.com’s numbers from February, MySpace accounts for 66 million monthly visitors and almost one billion visits. Facebook isn’t too shabby, either, but at 28 million monthly visitors, it’s less than half the exposure opportunity MySpace is. According to USA Today, there are over 110 million registered users on MySpace, making it the equivalent to the 11^th largest country in the world (bigger than Mexico, slightly smaller than Japan).

The problem is that those of us inside the bubble and hip to hardware, software and online trends grew tired of MySpace. When Facebook opened its doors to the general public, then started experimenting with social advertising models, we all got hot and bothered by the chic, clean, open API network. We left MySpace, or conveniently forgot to check in for messages there more than once a month, and declared it dead.

But it’s only dead to us. The rest of the world still digs the ‘Space. And those 66 million monthly visitors aren’t high school girls, either. According to Quantcast’s estimates, 62 percent of MySpace users are above the age of 24, they have a higher than Internet average concentration of both Hispanics and African Americans and 49 percent of users live in households making $60,000 and up.

Frankly, I made a mistake last year when I began to migrate most of my attention from MySpace and a healthy network of friends and contacts I’d made there to the chosen networks of the Internet marketing elite. The mistake wasn’t in building contacts on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. It was abandoning MySpace because those inside the bubble think it to be pedestrian. It might be, but there’s a hell of a lot of pedestrians there, if you haven’t noticed.

Marketing through social media is most effective when brands and companies put themselves on a personal plane with consumers. But you still have to reach those consumers. Turning our backs on MySpace, even belittling those who play there, is like calling Budweiser stupid for advertising during the Super Bowl.

Ignore MySpace because of its gaudiness and free expression and, “that is soooo 2006,” if you like, but ignore it at your own peril. That’s where the majority of the world is and will be for the foreseeable future. MySpace is gobbling up content deals with mobile networks, continually expanding their offerings to engage their users and, like them or not, they’ve got Newcorp’s pocketbook. They do music and video better than other major social networks, connect people with bands, comedians and filmmakers in a way that should make brands jealous and have a thriving subculture of niche blogs within their system few of us pay attention to. Shame on us.

Ironically, the advertising agencies and interactive firms we take such pleasure in mocking because they don’t get social media are the very ones benefiting from our short-sightedness. They’re so dumb, they only know to go where the most people are. In the end, crappy MySpace campaigns or not, they don’t look so dumb after all.

Wise up, kids. Just because you don’t personally like to play there doesn’t mean it’s a barren wasteland of marketing abyss. The rest of the world isn’t like us. And that, my friends, is often the only thing that keeps us from being successful.

Other Posts You’ll Find Interesting:

1. MySpace’s Growth Curve: Over?
2. Effectively Leveraging Social Networking
3. Diagnosis: Facebook Syndrome
4. Social Network Wars Are Over; Now The Fun Begins
5. A Successful MySpace Social Media Campaign

Technorati Tags: MySpace, Facebook, social networking, marketing, strategy

If there’s one thing I’ve done well professionally through the years is network. A year ago, no one in the social media space, or among national thought leaders on public relations (the basis of my professional discipline) knew who the hell I was. Two years ago, no one in the Louisville market did. Granted, much of that is because I spent 11 years a sports information director and existed in the parallel college athletics universe, but my experience connecting with people professionally through personal interaction has served me well.

Next Friday, I’ll touch down in Austin, Texas, for the 2008 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference. It will be the third major conference of social media and internet thinkers I’ve attended in the last six months. And each one gets better and better.

I’ve written before (here and here) about the benefits of networking socially – my term for off-line social networking – and how my previous two events like this specifically benefited my blog. The more people that know who you are, the more come read what you’re doing. Each event has resulted in dozens of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, Digg/Stumble/Mixx vote helpers and more. SXSW will be no different, for sure. But my excitement for this conference takes on a different perspective now that I’m not a nobody anymore. And I don’t mean that from an ego perspective, just that I’m going there with already established relationships with folks.

Here’s what I’m excited about:

Parties

It’s no secret I do work for a spirits company. And I’m a spirits guy. There’s nothing more fun to me than hanging at a cocktail party telling war stories and getting to know interesting people. I’ve had the honor of hanging with Brian Solis, Chris Heuer and others before. I’m looking forward to it again. Maybe I can catch Stephanie Agresta for two seconds this time. Chris Brogan will probably give me hell for taking him to a mall bar in Vegas and we’ll both try to behave this time to avoid a repeat of the drunk Utterz (Talk to Chris. He deleted it.)

Panels

While the networking is my thing, I genuinely do try to learn from the presentations. I’m excited to have the chance to glean knowledge from folks I’ve admired from a far for a while. Andy Beal, Rohit Bahargava, C.C. Chapman, Mack Collier, Jeff Jarvis, Beth Kanter, Charlene Li and Brian Oberkirch come to immediate mind. Of course, there’s Kawasaki, Ferris, Israel and Scoble, not to mention Jeremiah Owyang, who I was able to meet and chat with at BlogWorldExpo, but I’m a mere speck on their windshield … and if you’ve seen me, that’s saying something. Of course, if I play my cards right, I could really just go for the Conversation Starters segment:

Over drinks and appetizers, you’ll have a chance to share ideas with a number of people who have volunteered to start conversations: Shel Israel, Robert Scoble, Jeremiah Owyang, Charlene Li, Chris Heuer, Mack Collier and Lionel Menchaca, as well as several Federated Media authors.

Maybe Heuer will introduce me to folks.

But there are tons of folks I’ve either met or want to meet who will be there but aren’t speaking. I’d love to find time with Maggie Fox, Solis and Heuer to chat about the social media release. Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell of Citizen Marketers and Church of the Customer are going to be there. I need to buy them a Maker’s Mark. I hear Scott Monty, will be there. He and I have some red wax to remove. As a Communications Overtones reader and fan, I’m stoked about the chance to chat with Kami Huyse. I’d love to see Erin Kotecki Vest again. Erica O’Grady and Connie Reece are folks I’d like to meet. Jane Quigley is someone I have who I’d like to see again. And I’ve delayed tossing out this name until now because I know it will torture her, but it’s been too long since I’ve seen Tamar Weinberg.

Pals

The best part of the SXSW experience for me will be going there with my homies. Todd Earwood, Shawn Morton, Nick Huhn and Melissa King (You need a blog, damn it.) are representing from the ‘Ville. There may be others going, too, but we’re all fairly close and actively involved in the Social Media Club Louisville, so it will be nice to have some time with hometown friends, even if we have to go a few hundred miles to get it.

Needless to say, the opportunity to meet and greet these and dozens more fine folks gets my blood going. If I didn’t mention you, it’s not because I don’t want to connect. Find me and introduce yourself. If we’ve met before, smack me on the back of the head real good for not linking to you. (Except for you Dave … You’re from West, By God, Virginia. You won’t do it lightly.)

Please jump in the comments and let me know if you’re coming. I’d love to connect and network socially with you. If you are, go check out The Daily Idea’s guide to SXSWi.

And don’t be offended if I didn’t mention you above. I almost left out Tamar and I love Tamar. (Heh).

Perhaps I’ll even whip out the camera and do a future episode of SME TV with you, too! See you in Austin.

Other Posts You’ll Find Interesting:

1. SXSW News & PARTAY Info
2. Geek Spring Break – 2008 SXSW Party Central
3. Going To SXSW?
4. A Don’t Miss Event During SXSW
5. SXSW Wordwide Flickrite Meet-Up

IMAGE: Brian Solis, Chris Heuer and me at BlogWorldExpo. Photo by Todd Earwood and on my Flickr.

Technorati Tags: SXSW, South by Southwest, social networking, networking, social media, Jason Falls

There’s a lot of theoretical chatter online these days about building online communities. The people that are actually doing it are few and far between it seems. This week, I kick off the strategic and technical planning for an online community, so I’m moving from philosopher to doer in this space. It certainly feels good to have the opportunity to put the practice behind the preaching, but it is also an intimidating task.

From a tactical standpoint, I wanted to get some third party input on what the most important user features of an online community should be. What better third party to ask than my social media friends. On Wednesday, I Twittered:

And got a ton of great responses.

The consensus seems to be what you would guess: connectivity. It’s pretty simple. Without connections, there is no community.

But more specifically, what types? Is it just allowing them to post wall messages or does there need to be an element of internal private messaging/email? Is a forum/message board the right approach or a community chat/microblogging approach?

The analyst approach would be to refer back to the business goals of the community-building effort in the first place to discover the answer. Jeremiah Owyang’s recent Forrester report on Online Community Best Practices begins with determining your objectives and even says you should decide which interactions your customers are ready for. My question in response is, “How do I know?” Sure, research and focus groups can give me the answer, but what if I don’t have the time or the budget for such insight?

My thought is to start the community building on the absolute right foot: by asking for input from the community you already have. Never mind how small it might be in comparison to your vision, ask them, “Would you like an online community to connect to us and each other and if so, what functionality would be most important or attractive to you there?” You’re certain to get answers and, yes, they may vary as much or more than those of my Twitter friends. But you will at least have a sampling of input from your intended audience as to what is most important to them.

The only question left then is whether or not your anecdotal evidence is enough?

This is why Owyang also advises companies to prepare to be flexible. You can build a place for the community, but you can’t build walls around it. Your brand enthusiasts will surely give you a list of likes and dislikes from day one. So you plan for adjustments, for tweaks and for changes. Your responsiveness will be rewarded with increased loyalty and community satisfaction.

So as we put pen to paper this week and plot our course, I am going to recommend that we take pause and ask our brand enthusiasts the question I posed to my Twitter friends. What functionality is most important to you in an online community?

Their opinion counts the most for the project in question. Yours counts the most in helping shape my approach. Please, tell me: In joining an online community of brand enthusiasts or a loyalty or affinity group, what would be your most important need.

Other Posts You’ll Find Interesting:

1. Feedback On The Online Community Best Practices Report
2. Do Social Networks Follow The Traditional Business Cycle?
3. Forrester: Online Community Best Practices
4. A Community Of What?
5. How To Build A Community Of Brand Enthusiasts

Technorati Tags: online communities, building online communities, social networks, niche social networks, brand enthusiasts