Social Media Software and How It Can Assist In

SOCIALSOCIAL MEDIAMEDIA SOFTWARESOFTWARE adding social dimensions to your business

Social Media involves all the internet enabled means that people may

use to communicate, share and collaborate. This whitepaper features the social media phenomenon and the important social media trends

that are being adopted successfully by various businesses. Through various

real life examples, it shares that how social media has made a tremendous impact in the growth and development of these businesses. The whitepaper

also introduces the social media software and how it can assist in

leveraging effective social technologies and the available solutions .

Abstract 1 Introduction 2 Defining Social Media 2 Software The Power of Social Media 2 A Deeper Insight 3 Leveraging the Social Magic 3 Social Enablers 4 Crafting the Open Web 5 Add the Social “D” to 5 yor Domain Our Footprints on Social Web 6 Call for a Comprehensive 6 Platform Our Solution - 7 Impetus Technologies Inc. Unvailing Espirit 1 www.impetus.com About Impetus 9 October 2009 WHITE PAPER

SOCIAL MEDIA SOFTWARE

Introduction Defining Social Media Software

The Social Media Software spectrum The recent era has experienced a shift from the comprises a variety of software systems that “static” Web 1.0 internet to an interactive or allow users to communicate and share data. “conversational” world of Web 2.0. Social media can take many different forms, Participation in this social media revolution is including Internet forums, blogs, wikis, the key to harness the unparalleled marketing podcasts, pictures, video, etc. These and branding power of the internet for your interactions have become seismically business. successful on social networking sites Social Networking enables your customers to (Facebook, Orkut, hi5 and MySpace), become the strongest advocates of your multimedia sites (Flickr, Imeem and YouTube), products/services. This presents a host of new and blogging sites (Blogger and Wordpress). opportunities and untapped potential to your business stakeholders. The Power of Social Media This whitepaper highlights the important social In a very short time, the scope of social media media trends and introduces you to the ways has been redefined. With business networking and means of leveraging effective social sites like LinkedIn and micro-blogging sites technologies to meet your business objectives. like Twitter, social media is now popular

Social Media Factoids3(as of Jan’2009) amongst all ages. As per the recent report • 200,000,000 - number of active users on Facebook released by Nielsen1, “More than 90% of

• 70,000,000 - number of total videos on YouTube popular Twitter client Tweetdeck’s audience is (March 2008) over 25. Furthermore, Twitter.com’s reach is

• 133,000,000 - number of blogs indexed by Technorati 6.6 percent for kids, teens and young adults, since 2002 whereas it is 12.1 percent for those over 25.”

• 59% - percentage of bloggers who have been According to the University of Massachusetts’ blogging for at least 2 years Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research2, • 2,073,832,511 number of Tweets to date on Twitter “Just over one quarter of the Inc. 500 reported

______1 http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/teens-dont-tweet-twitters-growth-not-fueled-by-youth/ 2 http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/studiesresearch/blogstudy5.pdf 3 http://thefuturebuzz.com/2009/01/12/social-media-web-20-internet-numbers-stats/ 2 WHITE PAPER

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social media was very important to their smarter as a result and deeply joined in

business-marketing strategy in 2007. That conversation; are missing their best number has increased to 44% just one year opportunity.” SMM has evolved based on this

later.” thought. As per Wikipedia, Social Media

Marketing is an engagement with online A Deeper Insight communities to generate exposure, opportunity and sales by increasing traffic and building Due to the ever increasing penetration of social new business relationships. Common social media into businesses, two important and media marketing tools include Twitter, Blogs, related concepts have emerged; Social Media LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube5. Marketing and Social Media Optimization.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Cluetrain Manifesto4 states, “Markets consist The concept behind SMO6 is simple:

of humans, not demographic sectors. implement changes to optimize a website so Companies that don’t realize their markets are that it is more easily linked to; highly visible in

now networked person-to-person, getting social media searches on popular search engines (such as Technorati); and frequently

included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts

and vlogs. Fortunately, enabling SMO is relatively easy.

Leveraging the Social Magic

The buzz around social media is not only about

adding a social flavor to your web life; it is an opportunity to add significant value to your

business. As an organization, you can benefit Leverage the Social magic by giving your users a richer experience

______4 http://www.cluetrain.com/ 5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_marketing 6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_optimization

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through your website. This magic can be changing the perception of the media amongst

spread in the following ways: all.

• Connect by providing different ways to Live Examples network with a website like single sign-on, There are innumerable examples of websites which facilitates the users to carry their which are using the Social Media technologies. profiles and their social connections, from MySpaceId + Yahoo = Great Combo! one site to another without recreating their MySpaceId was recently integrated on Yahoo’s social graphs. new homepage. This enables users to view • Enrich user experience by adding new there MySpace friend updates, friend requests channels of communication including blogs, from the Yahoo homepage itself. forums, opinion polls, ratings & reviews.

• Share data of your site by using portability Dell SWARM

offered through social bookmarking, RSS, Dell Swarm13 is an initiative by Dell, which user activities etc. leverages social media and allows online users

• Promote your site with the help of your users to act as a purchase cooperative. without spending any dollars for marketing.

Social Enablers

Social Media Applications like Facebook,

MySpace, and Twitter have transformed the offline networks into the conversational online

mediums for connecting with people. To ensure

this, they have opened their doors via

OpenAPIs7. Concepts like Facebook Connect8, MySpaceId9, OpenSocial10, Google Friend

Connect11, Sign in with Twitter12 etc. are MySpace Id on Yahoo’s Home Page ______7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_API 8 http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php 9 http://wiki.developer.myspace.com/index.php?title=Category:MySpaceID 10 http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ 11 http://www.google.com/friendconnect 12 http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Sign-in-with-Twitter 13 https://www.dellswarm.com/sg/ 4 WHITE PAPER

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Crafting the Open Web services with the same digital identity15.

There are a couple of open standards which Organizations like AOL, BBC, Google, IBM, have helped the developers to integrate social Microsoft, MySpace, Orange, PayPal,

media on their websites. Below are three such VeriSign, Yandex, Ustream and Yahoo! act

specifications which are widely adopted in the as providers social arena: • OAuth - This is an open protocol, initiated

• OpenSocial - This defines a common API by Blaine Cook and Chris Messina, to allow for social applications across multiple secure API authorization in a standard

manner for desktop, mobile and web applications16. Sign-in with Twitter,

MySpaceId have also used this standard.

Add the Social ”D” to your Domain

Social “D” denotes adding a social dimension

to an existing business, hence, making it more Dell SWARM interactive. Enterprises from healthcare to

websites. With standard JavaScript and entertainment, irrespective of their size and

HTML, the developers can create domain, can engage and grow its customer applications that access a social network’s base by building a user-centric, social

14 friends and update feeds . There are many experience. websites that support OpenSocial, including Some possible use cases are enlisted below: hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Netlog, Ning, Use Case 1: Social “D” for an Orkut, and Yahoo! Information-only health website

• OpenId - This is an open, decentralized Yourfavoritehealth.com website gives standard for user authentication and access information about numerous diseases and

control. It allows users to log onto many medicines. The members of this website can ______14 http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ 15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID 16 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OAuth

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be empowered with Social Media (and from evangelized ventures across the web, to

networks like Facebook, MySpace). The users develop a deep expertise in this domain of

can rate the doctors, share experiences, and work. We have furthered the Social Media take appointments/advices online. Why not Technology by contributing to the Open Social

create an online community of doctors and Container, Apache Shindig project, and its

patients? integration modules to well established CMSs including Drupal17 and Liferay18. We have Use Case 2: Social “D” for an Information- executed the python port of Shindig to run on only travel website Google App Engine19, way before the java Myfavoritetravel.com site lists the flight version was out. One such contribution is even schedules, hotels available, holiday packages listed in Apache Shindig’s wiki on the ‘powered etc. By allowing people to share their travel by20’ page. experiences, hotel ratings, food reviews, etc. To know more about our work as social media the website makes them a part of their online enablers, we invite you to visit the website of travel group. This can simply increase the our Innovation Labs21. number of users to an earlier information-only travel site.

There can be many similar implications, Call for a Comprehensive Platform depending upon the domain, innovation and ideas of the businesses. At Impetus, we understand that the most important challenge with social media is the “problem of plenty”. There are numerous

Our Footprints on Social Web options and plethora of information available.

Impetus is focused on creating out-of-the-box The biggest challenge is to choose the best solutions in the social media domain. Our solution that meets the individual’s business

dedicated research engineers have requirements. Moreover, the need for a

______17 http://drupal.org/project/ShindigIntegrator 18 http://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-3097 19 http://code.google.com/appengine/ 20 http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/powered-by.html 21 http://www.impetus.com/ilabs/

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common platform which can expedite the Following are the distinguishing features of

social media integration, without getting deeply Esprit:

involved in the APIs or at the code level is • Communication & Collaboration: Add indispensible. Vendors are striving hard to build extensive features to your business from the such a zero learning solution for web pre-build list of social elements. businesses and enterprises.

Quadrants of Espirit

Our Solution– Unveiling Espirit • Social Web: Market your business through Impetus’ comprehensive platform called the “social goodies” offered by the existing “Esprit” offers a quadrant solutionsolution, for the networks. customers who want to build their business with the help of social media. Any organization can • Site Management: Centralize the control of

accelerate their business strategy from this your business via the admin interface.

flexible, yet comprehensive offering to improve • Social Analytics: Enhance your user collaboration, innovation, and user experience and measure the impact of your

management, with almost zero code. business by analyzing the social data.

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The robust design and architecture of the This offering has been actively used and

solution ensures high performance and deployed by few of our customers.

scalability of the applications, built using Esprit.

iLabs Impetus Innovation Labs or iLabs is the R&D division of Impetus. iLabs identifies and works on various emerging technologies in product development. The team explores new technology domains - a dedicated set of technical architects work on developing new concepts and frameworks or proof of concepts and prototyping new products for our clients.

iLabs offers expert services to its clients through a thorough focus on research, and premium technology services. The team provides reusable components and frameworks that facilitate accelerated development cycle for its clients. The clients get faster time to market their products and there is a significant reduction in the development costs

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About Impetus Corporate Headquarters

Impetus is a pure play product engineering UNITED STATES company providing outsourced software Impetus Technologies, IncInc. product design, R&D and related services to 5300 Stevens Creek Boulevard, Suite 450 leading global software and technology enabled companies. Headquartered in San San Jose, CA 95129, USA. Jose (CA), and with multiple development Phone: 408.252.7111 centers across India, Impetus has been involved in hundreds of product launches over its 15 year association with clients ranging from Regional Development Centers enterprise class companies to innovative INDIA technology start-ups. • New Delhi Impetus builds cutting-edge products utilizing • Indore the latest and emerging technologies for a diverse client base across domains including • Hyderabad Digital Media, Telecommunications, Healthcare, Mobile Applications, Web2.0, IPTV, and Internet Advertising. The company To know more creates leading edge products that underscore future trends while also offering premium Visit: http://www.impetus.com design consulting and product architecture Email: [email protected] services.

Impetus brings forth a perfect synergy of expert talent and competent engineering skills, coupled with technology frameworks and product development maturity to help you build sustainable, scalable and efficient next- generation products, and bring them faster to the market.