Media Transparent » Enterprise

The Free Social Media Training Platform

Pat Kitano — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:29:45 +0000

We have had success providing our social media training platform to a number of REALTOR Boards (an example in far flung Oklahoma City) and are extending the platform to any associations or enterprises who can use a social media training resource free.

The free social media training platform

View more presentations from Pat Kitano.

We’re developing social media training systems together with association / corporate marketing groups and consultants who add their training content to the platform. For example, we’re working with a wine consultancy developing a national social media marketing business using the platform for “basic training” and reference for their client base.

San Francisco & Civic Social Media

Pat Kitano — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:00:28 +0000

From Craig Newmark’s blog, Gavin Newsom is introducing social media to San Francisco civics, and creating a Zappos-like Twitter channel @SF311 to support non-emergency city nuisances like potholes and trash.

RecoverySF.org is set up for citizens to discuss the local issues related to the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA) passed by Congress, also known as the Stimulus Plan. It’s positioned as a bulletin board to solicit citizen opinion.

@SF311 is simply representative of the Twitter feed that we believe will soon replace telephone support for local community services. It’s a great example of using Twitter for asynchronous / real time support and a testament to the utility of Cotweet, an enterprise application that allows multiple city support personnel to reply to requests into @SF311.

Gavin Newsom is taking a page from Barack’s playbook in adopting new social media ideas that could eventually build him a following for his run for California governor.

Ten Ways Twitter has Completely Changed the Sales Process

Pat Kitano — Fri, 22 May 2009 05:55:14 +0000

Twitter is fueling Enterprise 2.0 and changing the sales process by opening up how providers and clients discover, interact and close deals with each other. It’s not hard to imagine that all sales forces will be Twitter-based within a few years (if not Twitter, some other system that ties providers and clients into open networks). Viewed in this light, closed “Twitter” systems like Yammer that keep corporate data and communications more private would limit the sales process to the narrow channels that existed pre-Twitter.

Pre-Twitter	Post-Twitter
Sales opportunities run through channels and pipelines	Sales opportunities also arise out of cloud, provider and client find each other via “shared business interest”
Sales happen closer to where the sales force is physically based	Sales can happen virtually anywhere with priority based upon size of opportunity
Relationships and networks facilitate execution	Sure, relationships matter, but older networks usually don’t facilitate new opportunities. Twitter builds new networks quickly via search, target and network
Referral-based networking systems conducive to building business connections	Sure, referrals work, but credible online reputation will now serve as a “self-reference”
Scheduling conference call three weeks in advance (frankly, I always thought this was arrogant)	Instantaneous, and serendipitous conversations happen
Hard to get noticed by decision makers	Retweet decision maker, compliment, and comment. Easy to start a conversation.
Dealing with the “gatekeeper”	Twitter facilitates direct communication between relevant parties
Sales calls limited from 9 to 5	On Twitter, business conversations can happen any time (if one so chooses), because Twitterers are generally on 24-by-7
Closing requires face-to-face	Twitter, social media and the recession facilitates closing by most economical means possible
Tedious sales support based on phone tree systems and locating the right resources	Twitter begins to replace the phone system with new support and CRM tools (note Salesforce is integrating Twitter)

What’s Missing from Today’s Hyperlocal Sites – Community Leadership

Pat Kitano — Fri, 08 May 2009 05:45:33 +0000

What’s missing from sites focused on a city? Community organizers. It’s the same leadership dilemma facing any organization, whether physical or virtual. Hyperlocal sites need to be driven and organized by hubs and influencers of the local community, and these hubs need to feel invested and committed to their “city site”.

Hyperlocal “news” sites like Outside.In and Topix automatically pull feeds from local publishers to re-create a local newspaper. Although there are sporadic comments to articles, there is little community engagement. CitySearch and Yahoo! Local serve as online Yellow Pages.

Engaging hyperlocal sites need “word of mouth”

In many cities, the best hyperlocal sites are developed by somebody, some company or group in the community. In Santa Barbara, Edhat.com, developed by a local software company, has distinguished itself in providing compelling local content.

Hyperlocal social networks a la Ning generally don’t gain traction (show me one that does) because it takes too long for anybody to invest the time to set up a complete profile. Twitter makes hyperlocal communication easy because it can serve as a proxy social network for a local community that “follows” each other. There’s no login/profile setup requirement, just tweet.

Breaking News City sites that aggregate local Twitter feeds across various categories are being developed in cities across the country by individuals, and groups like chambers of commerces, who are hubs of their communities. They invest their time to create a useful hyperlocal community site by providing local Twitterers a venue to gain exposure in the community. There’s energy in facilitating the community conversation that “national” sites like Topix and CitySearch don’t have.

Example Breaking News City sites:

The Democratic Web: Giving People the DIY Tools to Build their own Web Applications

Pat Kitano — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:03:57 +0000

Yes, we know how easy it is to build a web application today. WeFollow.com, launched by digg’s Kevin Rose, became a hit and got cloned quickly by Twitr.org:

Although the barriers to entry for developing a web application are low, it’s still difficult for non-technical “normal” people to build their own web application easily.

Most DIY application development solutions like Ning and blog platforms provide templated designs with feature limitations, and they all look the same. The Wordpress platform offers open source application feature sets that allow non-programmers to cobble together working applications.

EVOLVING WEB DESIGN

This is the next phase of web design – facilitating non-techies in the building of applications. Wordpress, functional but unslick, is so far the most accessible to the masses. We’re building Breaking News City sites on the Wordpress platform because we can share it easily with non-programmers, and we can efficiently teach them how to build, customize and maintain a site in 4-5 hours.

What happens when anybody can build a web application? VC-funded stealth projects become more risky when anybody can easily clone them. The obsession with keeping traffic on site is threatened. The new paradigm will be for entrepreneurs to build applications that are easily owned, adopted and customized by anybody, and perhaps charge a subscription fee for the privilege. In this world, real estate agents would be able to create a fully functioning real estate listings search site similar to Trulia.com, but host it on their OWN domain. Facebook pages could be spun off onto their own domain.

Owning the domain will become analogous to “owning the house”. Traffic becomes equity, and more important, the houseowner sets the rules. The Domus Breaking News Project is based on creating the new accessible applications that can be shared freely through networks and society. Our business model is to consult with enterprises to adapt and customize these new applications for their business.

9 Ways to Monetize Twitter Analyzed

Pat Kitano — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 06:06:11 +0000

At this point in the evolution of the social media, pay-to-play runs counter to any social network business model. The wildly popular Twitter will eventually have to break the barrier and declare a revenue model. In December, AdAge offered up a list of 9 ways Twitter can make money:

Charge for it
Advertising
Create a contextual ad engine
Charge for analytics
Enable Mobile Payments
Create subscription based groups
A Twitter Pro version
Merchandising
Sell the company

(h/t The Standard is running online betting on whether Twitter adopts a revenue model by June 30, 2009)

Here are examples/interpretations of each business model:

1) Charge for it.

Yesterday, real estate social network Active Rain announced its new $29/month fee for new members who want to post consumer-facing articles on Active Rain. The real estate industry is unique in its widespread adoption of the social media for business networking purposes, and Active Rain’s ability to connect its real estate agent members with consumers looking for a realtor makes pay-to-play an ROI proposition. $29/month may leverage one lead that can contribute $1,000s in fee income. There are active discussions on this policy at Active Rain (570 comments+) and Bloodhound Realty Blog.

I believe this is the first pay-to-play move by a large social network of 130,000+ members. It’s a courageous move that can be only assessed in hindsight based on future adoption rate.

2) 3) Advertising is being viewed too critically by the social community as a marketing relic or at worse, propaganda. Contextual ads a la Google Adwords could well work because Search.Twitter.com replicates a real time search engine.

4) Charge for analytics – Real time data mining of Twitter feeds in aggregate can create enterprise services for industries like finance and retailing that rely on instant trend analysis. Feb 14 Forbes discusses the analytics model.

5) Enable mobile payments – AdAge points to VC Nate Westheimer’s treatise that Twitter’s ubiquity on mobile devices can make it a mobile Paypal platform. The uploading of the iPhone picture of Flight #1549 in the Hudson onto Twitter application Twitpic is evidence of Twitter becoming an event-based mobile platform.

6) Create subscription based groups – Yammer, Present.ly and other enterprise Twitter platforms are developing. Twitter can watch them and replicate.

7) A Twitter Pro Version – isn’t that Friendfeed?

Merchandising – there are already a lot of characters on Twitter including the actors of Madmen. Have companies and users develop a stable of Twitter characters, brand and merchandise them.

9) Sell the company – the original strategy.

The Portable Social Graph

Pat Kitano — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 02:02:18 +0000

The Portable Social Graph is a killer concept behind the future social media business model. Very few can envision it because few live examples exist melding social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter into more traditional popular websites – ecommerce sites like Amazon, media sites like NYTimes or Hulu, and corporate/organizational sites like Toyota or NFL.com.

Razorfish, the new media ad agency, and its CEO Shiv Singh explain the potential power of Facebook Connect to bring social groups (”the social graph”) into transactional websites. Brilliant presentation…

Portable Social Graphs – Imagining their Potential

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: retail marketing)

Incorporate “Breaking News” into Websites and Make Them Compelling Reads

Pat Kitano — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 23:45:37 +0000

I have been discussing over the past half year a new paradigm for capturing committed loyal readership to websites using “Breaking News”. Consumers contemplating any major financial transaction based activity – real estate, securities, cars, even retail – need continual flow of real time news to evaluate when to pull the trigger on the transaction. They need a ticker tape to make intelligent decisions.

It’s natural for any company providing transaction based services to add relevant news feeds to serve their customers. Better yet, leverage the social media and get employees and partners of the company to contribute to breaking news.

Financial services

Financial services giant Fidelity just turned on their news feeds (h/t to Paul Kedrosky ). To make the feeds more compelling, they should update regularly and position themselves as proxy to Yahoo Finance, Marketwatch and Bloomberg to their clients.

Financial services giant ). To make the feeds more compelling, they should update regularly and position themselves as proxy to Yahooggggggggggggggggg Finance, Marketwatch and Bloomberg to their clients.gggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg

Real estate

Real estate is now hitting a turning point with the Fed/Treasury pushing mortgage rates down. Consumers need real time updates on their local markets to make an intelligent transaction decision. Homescopes is the first real estate site to “broadcast” local breaking news for the San Francisco Bay Area housing markets. I discuss Homescopes in detail at sister site Transparent Real Estate.

Real estate is now hitting a turning point with the Fed/Treasury pushing mortgage rates down. Consumers need real time updates on their local markets to make an intelligent transaction decision

Enterprises

Our company, Domus Consulting Group, is developing news feed systems (we call it the Social Broadcasting System ) for enterprises (it’s free!). We coach employees in using the System to distribute breaking news about their company and industry via the social media. We do this via our web conference based Social Media Marketing Workshops. You can find more information about our workshops from various participants’ blog posts, and see the Twitter based discussions here. You can register here or contact me.

Real Estate Brokerage Sites and Broadcast Media

Pat Kitano — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:37:04 +0000

Real estate brokerages need to provide more information about the housing markets to attract a loyal following of local readers. Just providing the latest listings is old hat. Real estate blogging has proven effective, but very few agents do it due to the challenges of writing and maintaining a blog.

Simply put, brokerages can now leverage their agents into reporting on their markets in real time without blogging. The social media, particularly micro-blogging tools like Twitter and bookmarking applications like Delicious, have advanced to a tipping point where agents can “broadcast” updates in sound bite format. Brokerage sites then aggregate all their agent updates and comments into a stream of compelling news feeds – new listings, info on recent sales, multioffer stories (118 on a house in San Jose recently!) neighborhood changes, new deals – that is displayed on the home page. The analogy: Think of providing a housing update ticker tape, anybody interested in real estate is compelled to subscribe to it and watch it on a daily basis, just like CNBC.

Example: Chase International

Chase International has been a pioneer in providing the Web 2.0 interface between their agents and the consumer, starting with their social network Chase Nation. ChaseNation’s expressed mission is to provide a wealth of commentary on the Northern Nevada and California High Sierra housing markets and create consumer loyalty, even inviting them into the Chase Nation social network. The key to ChaseNation’s success in execution has been their agent involvement to provide that commentary. We’ve recently begun working with Chase agents through our Social Media Marketing Workshops on the mechanics of “broadcasting” that commentary across the web via a variety of social media applications. By doing so, agents directly benefit from positioning themselves as experts in their market. This translates into increased online exposure that generate leads without blogging.

Want to know more about the mechanics?

We invite broker/owners, agents and others interested in the broadcast social media to free webinars this week that will detail how to develop this new brokerage website that “broadcasts” real time information to your customers. Best of all – the system is also free to implement! We’re scheduling the one hour webinars this Thursday from 10:30-11:30 and Friday from 10:30-11:30. Please click here to register.

Testimonials

You can find commentary and testimonials on our Social Media Marketing Workshops at this Twitter based group (called #smmw) where participating agents communicate during our webinar sessions. If you’re an agent interested in learning more about our Social Media Marketing Workshops, we are starting a new 12-week session on Mondays from 10:30-11:30 Pacific time, starting November 10. You can register at this link.

The Social Broadcasting System
Slideshow: Website 2.0, Creating the Conversational Web

Strategic Corporate Investment in Social Media – Leveraging LinkedIn

Pat Kitano — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 05:53:49 +0000

LinkedIn raised $22.7 million and their new investors include enterprise systems company SAP and publisher McGraw-Hill.

Strategic reasons? (just guessing)

An enterprise system company like SAP can port LinkedIn’s personal profile data, networks and network communications within the enterprise system. This automates the user experience so they may continue to work on LinkedIn, and have SAP capture this work. That’s only the first step; SAP and other enterprise systems will likely find ways to port bookmarking applications like Delicious and micro-blogging applications like Twitter or Yammer. They would use feed-based aggregation to port these data into their systems until they start looking like “Enterprise Facebook or Friendfeed“.

A publishing company like McGrawHill could leverage LinkedIn profile information to provide context to their articles in their magazines like Business Week. For example, LinkedIn could provide a “opt-in” on user profiles that allows publishers like Business Week to link quoted personage to their LinkedIn profile. Example: Pat Kitano says “blah blah”… LinkedIn would become the online Who’s Who, as well as a Who knows Who.