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 SOCIAL MEDIA SOFTWARE 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 3 WHITE PAPER SOCIAL MEDIA SOFTWARE 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 SOCIAL MEDIA SOFTWARE 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 5 WHITE PAPER SOCIAL MEDIA SOFTWARE 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