Symphonious

It's a common question - what's the point of social networks? The most common answer is basically none. Most social networks provide yet another way to get in touch and keep in touch with people which is great but lets face it, there are about a billion different ways to communicate and leaving messages on someone's wall only looks good compared to sending smoke signals. Some people might argue that it lets you map out and visualize your social network but seriously I know who my friends are, why don't you? The address book has been around a long time and it still works seriously well.

I think the best way to highlight how seriously useless plain social networks are is to look at the 10 Best Facebook Applications For Business Professionals:

• Conference Calls
• Voicemail
• Asking Questions
• Posting Video Messages
• Introductions
• Business Cards
• Phonebook
• Recommendations
• Defining other people with a tag cloud
• Business directory

Anyone see anything new in there? Anything remotely likely to change the face of business? Nope. Gimmicks galore and sure you can make yourself look all hip and web 2.0. Yes it's very important to reach out, connect with your clients and be part of the discussion but social networks aren't suddenly making it possible to do that, they add the burden of yet another way you have to do it and most of them put up all kinds of walls to make it difficult to do so.

Now that's not to say that the idea of social software is bad - just the idea of social software with no point. What if instead of just building up communities for the heck of it, we built up communities to achieve a common goal or a series of goals? In other words, what if there was a point to it all? That's what LiveMocha is doing by building a social network of people who want to learn a foreign language. Dan Kaplan put me onto LiveMocha and he nails the key cognitive change between what we'll look back on as the hype of social networking and what actually stands the test of time:

The key is that, unlike so many of the wannabes in the social network game, LiveMocha’s social network is not the central focus of the site but simply a feature.

Social networks are not the point, social networks are the tool and it's about time we started realizing that and start putting it to work. There are two ways for this to unfold, either we'll start seeing really useful Facebook applications being built - I imagine it would have been possible for LiveMocha to be done as a Facebook application, or the explosion of different social networks will expand to the point where users simply demand openness and the ability to move their social network around.

Either way the time is coming where the social network will be a feature and a tool, not the entire system. Frankly, I can't wait.

I got some really positive feedback on the various community/openness projects that I've been spearheading within Ephox from one of our OEMs today. Apparently they've discovered our early access program and are already trying out our brand new Express Edit functionality1.  It's really nice to actually hear from clients that these elements are useful as we haven't really managed to build up a community, even if we are seeing gradually increasing traffic. For a while now we've had potential new employees commenting on Planet Ephox which is great, but we haven't really heard from clients taking advantage of it, even if we've seen some of the indirect effects via analytics and support cases.

Now getting great feedback from one client is satisfying but it's not the end game - of course we want to impress all our clients like this by whatever means it takes. What I find most exciting about this is that it demonstrates to the sales and marketing teams that our openness and even our engineering practices2 are actually valuable to clients, particularly OEMs where the relationship is more important and long term. The business users and product managers probably don't care about automated tests and early access, but the engineers that have to actually integrate our product do. If we can provide them with tools like the hints and tips on LiveWorks! or early access to new features, they can better integrate our products and get the most out of them for the actual end users. In the end, that's what everyone should be working towards and we can and will help out on multiple levels.

1 - Don't forget to let us know how it goes and how we could improve it btw….↩

2 - continuous integration, TDD and all the other things we do to ensure quality↩

One of our board members left a comment on Brett's blog this morning and I love the way it meshes with my thinking that employee blogs is a crucial tool for senior management to keep up with the directions, understanding and thoughts of the rank and file:

Well, my friend I gotta say that whilst reading board papers a link to a blog is a welcome relief. I get the feedback I crave and welcome and also get a general sense of what is on the minds of your team.

I can set up blogs for Ephox employees in about 5 minutes, complete with an awesome editor :) - who's next?

I'm sitting here in Auckland airport transitioning through to San Francisco and there's an interesting synergy to the stuff that's coming through. First of all, I see that my rash of Twitter subscriptions (my twitter page) and my mentioning twitter in my last post has caused a few people to add me to Twitter and check out my blog.

In turn, at least one of them read a post mentioning Planet Ephox and posted it to their delicious account. That in turn prompted someone else to invite me to CommunityOne (a lead-up event to JavaOne which I'll try to get to if I can - my flight arrives about 1pm so I'll miss half of it). What's most interesting there is that these extra contacts, invites and awareness of Ephox are completely impossible to track. Even if you had a sophisticated cookie system across all the sites involved, you really need to know what the people are thinking to see if you're having any effect or whether they see good things or bad things etc. If and when you get to the point that someone makes a purchase, there is likely to be a huge range of influencing factors that caused them to get there.

It interested me then that Robert Scoble pointed out the Fear of Google, and among it:

3) Google is changing expectations of advertisers. One advertising agency exec told me she’s seeing that more and more advertisers are only willing to pay for “the last click” — she works for an airline, for instance, who wants to see ROI reports on all ads now, so it’s getting harder and harder to do creative advertising (which is where advertising agencies add their value and get their fees) in exchange for “boring” text ads. Online “pay per action” ads are training advertisers that they should be able to track everything about advertising and how well it’s working for them. Of course, as we were talking about this on the bus we rolled by a Coca Cola umbrella. I wonder how well THAT is converting!

The Coca Cola unbrella is a great example too - the aim being to make people ask for a Coke instead of any other type of Cola just because the term seems so much more common. The same thing applies to every other brand - the more people hear about your products and your company the more they'll think of you when they're talking to someone with a problem that your products might solve. They don't even have to actually recommend you - they may never have seen your products, but they mention you and get them looking into your products so you have a chance.

That's one of the big reasons I want to see more people at Ephox blogging (we already have most of the engineering team, product management and the CEO blogging, next I want to get the sales team on board). That's why we created Planet Ephox and it's why we're starting to build a community around LiveWorks! It gets the brand out there - it's completely untrackable but that's ok, every so often you see chains of communication flowing in, through and around these ventures that bring good things to your business.

Stats and quantified results are great, but marketing is all about people and they are multifaceted, complex and thus extremely difficult to track accurately. Google stats appear accurate, but they're not and that's deceptive. You need to look at the bigger picture.