Tete

Voter registration efforts typically rely on a great deal of labor and community outreach. Barack Obama’s massive spring and summer registration effort will likely rely primarily on card tables and paper forms.

But the University of Washington students behind the new Facebook application Your Revolution are working a different angle. By comparing a user’s friend list to their state’s voter registration rolls, this application seeks to determine who isn’t registered to vote. It then gives users the opportunity to send an invitation to their friends to register to vote online:

The app features a sophisticated and well-designed interface and encourages users to participate in a voter registration contest.

Unfortunately, this app only works in states that allow online voter registration. But as more states roll out online registration, I think you’ll see applications like this getting real pickup.

I’m still waiting for the day when we can use a social application to actually vote. Imagine ballots spreading like wildfire among people my age the way that viral videos do. Youth turnout would be through the roof.

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A lot of the recent buzz in the tech sector has been about unsuccessful efforts to monetize online social tools via advertising. Google is losing money on their advertising deal with MySpace. User sentiment suggests that demographic targeting doesn’t raise the relevance of advertising, and clickthrough rates are low across the board.

It’s not that social networks aren’t playing a role in business transactions. Blogger Charles Hudson wrote that he routinely makes transactions whose impetus has been a recommendation from friends through an online social network:

Judging by the activity I see within my own network, there are a lot of my friends using social networks as social Q&A systems to get input, advice, and recommendations in addition to just letting folks know what they’re up to at the moment.

But that activity doesn’t translate into revenue for the networks, and advertisers aren’t seeing the conversions like they do with Google’s AdWords service. So what’s a marketer to do?

A few suggestions:

1. If you’re doing targeted, self-serve advertising on Facebook, get as specific as you can. Avoid stereotyping your potential customers, all women are not interested in weight loss. Many men are not interested in having sex thrown at them all day long.
2. Think about ways of rounding out your campaign to encourage echo chamber behavior. Everyone is after conversions these days rather than brand awareness, so be sure to link your ad to a landing page that drives conversions and also enables social sharing of product recommendations. Even if the user who clicks through to your site doesn’t wind up becoming a customer, you want to enable him to encourage his friends to visit via social mechanisms such as embedding a video in his MySpace page or sharing your landing page on Facebook because it contains interesting content.
3. Consider building something useful — like an embeddable widget or a Facebook application that lets your customers connect with their friends in a way that involves your brand.

Earlier today, I posted about how Barack Obama’s website allows users to build their own fundraising campaigns and community blogs. To be sure, it’s a great way to encourage grassroots participation — but it can also be a recipe for disaster if you don’t execute properly.

It was revealed today that a user on the Obama site — ostensibly a supporter of his rival Hillary Clinton — used a JavaScript exploit to redirect the entire community section of his site to Clinton’s campaign website. Apparently, users can drop code — completely unfettered — into their own personal sites, giving them the ability to create any number of malicious behaviors. Already, people have suggested how to deposit malware and spyware onto the site.

I think the Obama campaign should pester their staffer, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes to help them fix this problem and to anticipate other exploits. After all, Facebook has built a whole suite of code restrictions around its platform in order to prevent just these sorts of attacks.

Earlier this month, I wrote about how the presidential campaigns were using online social networks to give the appearance of listening to stakeholders. Baratunde Thurston wrote a great response — complete with diagrams — and brought up many important points.

One of those points outlined how candidates “listen” to constituents online by raising money:

Again, politicians are at the top of the heap, this time tapping into millions of small donors. Obama is the king of this right now. At this phase, politicians enable donors to solicit from other donors with their own mini-campaigns and donation widgets. This is significant, as it threatens the big time financial interests who’ve long held the ear (and balls) of our elected officials.

Here’s his diagram:

But both of our posts overlooked a key piece of this fundraising phenomenon, which might look something like this:

As Baratunde noted, Obama is dominating in the small donations category. He’s had a record-breaking 1 million individual donors to his campaign. His website is also ideally poised to enable his supporters to raise money for him, creating their own portals at MyBarackObama.com and rolling their own fundraising campaigns.

New York filmmaker and photographer Scott Cohen decided to use this capability to build something innovative: An Obama Minute. The idea was to encourage 10,000 people to give $100 each to the campaign at an appointed hour. The movement was picked up by other Obama supporters online, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) which has been pimping the initiative on its website.

The jury is still out on just how much this campaign will raise. But no matter the outcome, the Obama campaign is to be congratulated for creating the fertile soil in which these kinds of grassroots efforts can grow. In my first post on this subject, I wrote about the five major goals of online community building as outlined by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff in Groundswell:

1. listening
2. talking
3. energizing
4. supporting
5. embracing

The fundraising tools at MyBarackObama.com are a great example of #4: helping your community members to support one another, and help you in the process.

Mashable posted yesterday about Flickr Code, the new — and rainbow-colored — site for Flickr developers. From there, you can easily access the Dev blog, monitor new Flickr deployments, discuss the API, work on the open-source Flickr Uploadr, or as Mashable put it, “snoop in on the Flickr dev team and see what tricky business they’ve been involved in.”

If you’ve clicked over to the site, you’ve probably noticed by now that this community site isn’t even a proper social network in and of itself. It relies on links to existing message and chat boards within Flickr, posts from an existing developer blog, and a random stream of photos from Flickr headquarters.  It’s not new content, but it’s presented in a new way, at a destination that’s just for the truly geeky coder types who build stuff around Flickr.

If your organization has a community of geeks or developers that work around your product, and you want to show them how much you care, it’s as easy as repurposing content from other sources — like your developer blog, or from certain threads in your forums — and putting it in one easy-to-find portal. If you don’t happen to have a fully-fledged social networking tool onboard like Flickr does, it’s pretty easy to build one with the free, open-source forum software known as Vanilla.

Facebook’s long-anticipated tabbed profile layout will contain room for individual application tabs, says Inside Facebook blogger Justin Smith. Under the new system, users will be able to create a special profile section for their favorite application. This will give application developers an unprecedented amount of real estate on the Facebook profile to display user data.

It’s become common wisdom at this point that display or “showoff” apps don’t do well on Facebook. Users aren’t there to stare at one another’s profiles. Not when there’s so much else going on. MySpace users are more apt to show off.

But with the increased customizability of the profile, this may change somewhat. Users will still be selective about what applications they choose to enable in this way, but I predict that applications that allow users to enhance their personal brand via the profile in dynamic, interesting and highly customizable ways will experience a bump in user engagement and adoption. After all, nothing could be a better endorsement of your application than a user creating a special tab for it on their profile.

Without any hard data about how this phenomenon will play out, the only thing to do is engage in wild speculation — my favorite pastime. Here goes: [click to continue...]

I received an e-mail from the FWE&E this morning letting me know that the videos from the event I participated in last month are now online.

There were some fantastic presentations that are worth a look, or even a second look.

Click here to download them free.

Longtime users of the Facebook platform have seen how applications from popular web services like Twitter can add tremendous value to the News Feed and Mini Feed features. In fact, one could argue that News Feed was the inspiration for lifestreaming tools like Tumblr and FriendFeed.

Now, it appears that the inspiration flows two ways. Facebook announced today that they would begin allowing users to import Mini Feed stories from Flickr, Picasa, Yelp and del.icio.us.

To use the new service, go to your profile and look at the Mini Feed section. Look for the new “import” link at the top, right corner of the Mini Feed profile box. Then, follow the instructions to import your activity into Facebook.  No word on how soon users will be able to import other activity, but other promised services include Digg.

I wonder how fast these updates will become a part of the site, and whether MySpace profile updates and other information will be included in the lifestream.

Also, why is Facebook announcing a feature associated with the Feed when the main feature is clearly broken at the moment? I wonder if this feature addition is the culprit for the massive News Feed slowdown.

Educated professionals are a key constituency for every successful campaign, as they tend to be both civic-minded and have the disposable income necessary to make campaign contributions. This constituency is building an online community on Linkedin, and all three major presidential candidates are using the site’s Answers feature to ask those constituents questions.

Seven months ago, Senator Obama asked, “How can the next president better help small business and entrepreneurs thrive?” Yesterday, Senator McCain joined the conversation by asking, “What is the biggest challenge America faces?”

In their new book, Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff outline five major objectives in online community building:

1. listening
2. talking
3. energizing
4. supporting
5. embracing

If I had to wager, I’d say that the candidates’ efforts on Linkedin fall neatly into the second category. [click to continue...]

About a month ago, I posted a strategy for conversation monitoring by following the attention streams of the influencers in your space. Facebook and Twitter are a couple of my favorite tools for doing this.

One of the downsides of Twitter is that its straightforwardness makes it difficult to see who your friends know and figure out who else you might want to be paying attention to. You have to actually stay on top of who people are having conversations with if you want to be a full participant in the community.

Enter Twubble, which interfaces with the Twitter API and tells you who your friends are following. If enough of your friends are following someone, chances are that you might want to follow them, as well.

[Via Rodney Rumford.]

Google is scheduled to make a big announcement tonight and TechCrunch is speculating that it’s related to BigTable — which could be used to enable a scalability solution that competes significantly with Amazon. This comes on the heels of unscheduled downtime for both Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services.

I talked to Emmett Shear, CTO of popular lifecasting service Justin.tv. They use EC2 to handle overflow during peak demand times for their site. He told me that Google would have to significantly undercut Amazon to justify his relocation expense, even with the recent outages.

TechCrunch says that the main competitive factors will be downtime and price, but I’ll add ease of use to that. If Google builds in an application like Scalr that comes standard with its system — or modifies and bundles the open source Scalr with its product — that would be enough to make me take a serious look at Google’s services over Amazon’s.

Update: Here’s what Google announced. This is an Amazon competitor in some ways and not in others. As Mashable put it, the big winner in all of this is Google - and the Python community.

Widget marketing is a relatively new strategy, one that many mainstream businesses are conservative about attempting for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is scalability.

Obviously, the biggest concern for anyone building a widget marketing campaign is to get the widget into circulation and widely used. But what if you do your job too well? What if your widget takes off too fast for your servers to keep up?

Scalability issues have stymied many a tech-heavy marketing initiative. One example is the Snakes on a Plane campaign that enabled users to send a custom phone call to friends using pre-recorded statements from Samuel L. Jackson. They underestimated demand, and the lousy execution became as much a part of the story as the messaging was.

This is of particular concern in organizations whose primary function is not building and scaling Web-deployed tools.

The recently open-sourced Scalr makes scaling innovative online marketing initiatives just a little bit easier. Scalr is a super-smart framework for managing the different resources provided by Amazon’s “Elastic Computing Cloud”  (a.k.a. EC2) service. In normal-speak, this means that Scalr can automatically determine what kind of resources are needed based on the demand for your widget and then get them from Amazon when you need them — and only when you need them — without human intervention.

If you’re looking into widget deployment as a marketing strategy, this might be a good tool to keep in mind as you move into the scalability and infrastructure phase of your planning.

The Gang over at techPresident has astutely observed that Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is geotargeting her site’s content. Depending on where users are located, they might see campaign content about seating delegates from Michigan and Florida, supporting Senator Clinton in Pennsylvania, or how to help the campaign in Indiana.

If your business goals include outreach to location-based communities, geotargeting is a cheap and effective way present them with the content most relevant and useful to them. Users might not notice that they’re being geotargeted, but they’ll certainly find your site more helpful and relevant than that of your competition.

Well, she is when it comes to you. Scoble’s still pretty darn influential, to be sure. But a recent study by Canadian research firm Pollara demonstrates that when it comes to key purchasing decisions, people trust friends and family more than they trust famous bloggers:

Of more than 1,100 adults polled in December, nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by “well-known bloggers.”

This seems to back up the model advocated by Duncan Watts:

Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

It may be that we need to shift away from the “influencer-focused” model when it comes to online social marketing. It may be more productive to assist passionate users — be they bloggers with a PageRank of 8 or your grandpa — to connect with the people that trust them in a way that is relevant to the core value of the product.

In short, you need to engage with your user community and provide them with tools they find useful. This can be as simple as blogging about an issue of core interest to your community and making it easy for them to share your content with their friend when they see fit. It may be more complex — an organization targeting busy commuters could build an interactive map of public transit options in major metropolitan areas.

It might be that — as the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives recently decided — you’ll need to build a full-featured social network for your users to help them support one another.

But if engaging with the most widely read bloggers is your only strategy for using leveraging the social Web as a marketing tool, you may want to rethink things a bit.

Cisco is putting together an hour-long TechWise TV webcast about the application of Web 2.0 to business with our good friends Jeremiah Owyang and Robert Scoble. Here’s the trailer:

The event will take place tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. PST. You can click here to test your system, download the streaming software and watch the webinar tomorrow. It should be really cool.