Author: Christopher Carfi

Tonight I’ll be participating in an "Arts and Media Discussion Salon" at CELLspace in San Francisco.  Entreprenprovocateur Rachel Hospodar, fresh off a number of great shows and a tour through Maker Faire has pulled together a cast of folks from the art and business communities to address a number of topics.  Rachel:

"This salon is growing out of thoughts I’ve been kicking around about business, the arts, and where the worlds of expression and profit meet.  The nonprofit structure is crucial to a lot of arts, media, and other commercially nonviable projects being able to exist, allowing freedom and legitimacy in seeking funding and assistance.  I’ve worked at a lot of nonprofits, though, and watched too many of them hamstring themselves through a refusal to acknowledge the lessons to be learned from for-profit business – accountability to your audience, a focus on what works, a pragmatic approach to the work itself with a greater focus on the big picture than on specific decisions.

Artists and arts projects changing traditional approaches to marketing & business.  Are artists more likely to build compassionate business models? Innovative business models?"

Sounds a little bit like a global microbrand conversation, eh?

Here’s where the salon is taking place.  Stop on by, won’t you?

CELLspace
2050 Bryant, San Francisco (map)
7:30pm until 10:30pm
Free admission
Free drinks and snacks

Arts and media panels – Discussion and Q&A
Live music – Visual art show

More info here

Interesting research from the GuardianUK regarding online social networking.  The key quotes: "Social networking sites allow people to broaden their list of nodding acquaintances because staying in touch online is easy…but to develop a real friendship we
need to see that the other person is trustworthy. We invest time and
effort in them in the hope that sometime they will help us out. It is a
kind of reciprocal relationship."

Here’s the whole thing.

Hat Tip:  Valdis Krebs

"Marketing is the management process of delivering customer satisfaction" – Tom Miller

Hat Tip:  Marty Thompson

Earlier this year, Success Magazine contacted me to be on a panel that was doing a "business make-over" of a social networking startup.  The members of the panel were given background on the startup, their financials and plan, and current activities.  The company’s name was Dwela, and this was the setup:

"When two thirtysomething cousins had the idea to create an online networking site for home industry professionals, Dwela.com was born.  But will their plan to be the MySpace of the  home succeed?"

It was a lot of fun to participate; thanks again to Success Magazine for the opportunity.  Read the article here.

The industry analyst firm IDC is has released a new report that indicates that the enterprise social networking market is ready for ignition and liftoff.

"The social networking application market was relatively small in 2006, coming in at $46.8 million, a new study published by IDC reports. By 2009, however, this market will grow to $428.3 million creating a new application segment and establishing social networking as a new communications tool used for many purposes other than consumer socializing."

The report continues:

"There are three social networking segments emerging.  These include: self-service applications used by groups and marketing campaign teams; brand applications that focus on persistent customer engagement; and enterprise applications that provide more effective ways of working with customers, partners, and other external parties." (emphasis added)

This is exactly in line with what we’ve been saying for a while — once the "ooooh…shiny!" factor wears off of Facebook and the like, application platforms that use social networking for business purposes will become another key part of the enterprise infrastructure.  (In fact, we’ve even written a whitepaper about this, which is available for download here.)

Hat tip:  Paul Greenberg

David Brazeal: "Social networks allow us to treat people like people. Y’know, build relationships and understand them and offer them something valuable to them.  The
reason so many small organizations are ahead in the social network
space is that they’ve been conditioned to operate on the level of
personal relationships. Doing that online is a natural extension of
their modus operandi." (emphasis David’s)

AdAge: "For all the talk about how much money Facebook and MySpace are making
off ads — and whether or not those ads work — there’s a growing sense
of concern that the promise of social networking as a marketing vehicle
is getting lost. Some marketing execs are suggesting the space should
be used less like a paid media vehicle and more like a
customer-relationship-management tool." (emphasis added)

Bonus quote from Debra Aho Williamson: "[Display advertising] is the ‘low-hanging fruit’ and the real potential of social networks has yet to be tapped."

Bingo!

Robert Scoble writes:

“Think about how a business would change if it knew every one of its customers had a Facebook account.

I was thinking of a hotel/casino where when I walked in the iPod in
the room was playing the music that I had set as my favorite on my
Facebook profile. The kind that you’d want to go to after gambling online with the free picks here. The digital screens in my room had all my photos and
some random photos from my friends. My favorite movies and TV shows
were on the video device. The bar knew my favorite drink and how I
liked it made.

That got me thinking about how I’d change my business after I knew everything about my customers.”

In some ways, Robert’s point is spot-on. As customers, we need the capability to store our preferences, interests and relationships in a sharable, digital form, should we decide to. But we also have the need to only disclose that information to the vendors with whom we want it shared. In the hypothetical example above, if I don’t want that particular establishment to have access to my information, they can’t have access to it. I think some would be against going into a casino that had all their personal information on display. Perhaps the example could be improved if it was a private personalized room service, and customers could go to sites like the 918kiss official website to do their gambling if they so wished. After all, casinos are not the only place where people can gamble. Many people prefer to simply pop into their local bookies or visit one of the top 10 online sportsbooks. By doing this, they can decide whether or not to share their personal information.

But more importantly, until we can control our own personal information at any time, and move it to the information providers we choose (which will likely NOT be a single, centralized entity like Facebook), these types of efforts will be stunted.

Now, let’s imagine a place where not only can we store our information online and only share it with those we choose, but the vendors with whom we have shared that information do intelligent things with it, such as tailor our experience and our true “customer relationship” with their organization based on our individual preferences, needs and interpersonal affinities. NOW we’re talking… Oh wait, it’s somewhat like this anyway, as you can see, if you were to often visit somewhere such as the various uk casinos not on gamstop, you’ll then have adverts tailored to your desires for gambling online via other services that are trying to get your custom.

Bonus question: What is the object pictured in the photo above, and why is it relevant to this post?

Nancy White: "Guys With Big Huge Skewers of Beef"

Nice piece from Wired: Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time For Social Networks To Open Up

The key part of the article, and one that seems to be the focus of a number of other recent writings, such as Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon’s "Thoughts on the Social Graph," is the explicit exposition of the relationships between the individuals in the network. 

In the Wired article, Scott Gilbertson writes:

"The web still lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between
people’s identities on the internet. The absence of this secret sauce
— an underlying framework that connects "friends" and establishes
trust relationships between peers — is what gave rise to social
networks in the first place. While we’ve largely outgrown the
limitations of closed platforms (take e-mail or the web itself), no one
has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends on
the internet at large."

I agree with Gilbertson’s statement, as well as Fitzpatrick’s call to "make the social graph [ed. – in other words, the information on relationship connections and their types] a community asset." This means that there is a call for an open, interoperable infrastructure to communicate "friend" relationships for public statements of connection.

This is another piece of the puzzle that is being put together with respect to managing one’s own information, for example in the case of the "red dot" personal data store in the VRM discussion.  Just like all other pieces of our personal information as customers / individuals, we should be able to manage this relationship information as we see fit, and not have it be yet another asset of ours that is wrested from us and stored in vendor silos.

The conversations linked above are a good start.  But they only go part of the way. (Yes, we do need to crawl before we can walk before we can run, but we also need to keep an eye on the longer view.)  Three other key questions that need to be kept in mind are the following:

1) How do we separate "public" statements of relationship, from those we wish to keep private, or only share with certain classes of other contacts?

2) More importantly, how do we universally store not only information about our relationships, but also that profile information about ourselves?

3) Similar to (1), how do we also share our personal information on a trusted basis?

These are the early, pioneering days of these discussions.  Looking forward to connecting with lots of folks on this, and continuing to work on creating answers that work for everyone – both customers and vendors.

N.B. Cerado Haystack is committed to openness on many levels