As my digital consulting business gets busier I continue to confront a common business decision that digital leaders face about the future success of their respective websites and overall digital business model.
Should we build/rent/buy a full suite of onsite social networking tools ?
I will be first to admit that my perspective on this has changed since ‘06/’07 when my company merged with ThirdAge and I ran the project to rebuild the entire Thirdage.com platform, which included a robust social toolset. Much great evolution has occurred since then and I will use this post to raise some key thoughts for digital leaders to contemplate as you make these decisions.
Basic First Question – How an I going to materially grow audience ?
My supposition is that even if you are a high-traffic media destination today, aggressively growing audience to your core website is going to be tough, especially without significant marketing dollars. How many high-value distribution deals can get done? How many organic SEO improvements can you make? All these (any the many other) tactics to build audience are smart and need to get done, yet digital leaders over the next year or so will still struggle to hit their numbers. Clearly, given the current state of the display business and pendulum swinging to paid models – revenue in the short term will suffer.
Given the success of the social networking toolset (friends lists, groups, comments, etc.) traffic and user engagement metrics have improved, thus generating more customer loyalty and overall impressions to be monetized. All good, yet the real question is in the details of what makes a good social strategy and how does that help grow audience. The right answer may be different depending on each individual property.
Will your audience sign-up (and actually use) a social toolset created on your core site?
When I speak with digital leaders I hear fear about the competition especially when they are not first movers with features/functions (such as a social toolsets) on their core site. The feeling is that since other have it and it seems to be working – they must. I disagree.
Generally speaking, my humble opinion is the “Field of Dreams” concept of “build it and they will come” is likely not going to provide the return digital leaders are looking for. I am a fan of a “community light” toolset on the core web site and leverage the full featured social horsepower where your audience is. More specifically, build unique keyword-targeted content and features on your site with the basics (comments, sharing, etc.) and capitalize on Facebook Connect and OpenSocial inter connectivity as these toolsets will continue to allow media companies to build real audience, social equity, brand value, and organic SEO effectiveness. Most importantly, measure – adjust, then measure again- and then adjust again, and so on – all against a set of success metrics defined early on. This can include traffic, referrals, conversion funnels, entry/exit point performance, registrations, email metrics, search queries, etc. Going offsite with your full-features social toolset allows you to build reputation and credibility amongst a much wider audience.
What is Facebook Connect and OpenSocial ?
Facebook Connect (FC)
Facebook was first to develop a mechanism for external sites to securely (with permissions) interact with users and their data on Facebook as well as on external sites. They build a proprietary mechanism to do this called Facebook Connect and it has been received with great praise. FC provides developers with a technical mechanism (APIs) to communicate with Facebook users and their data on external sites/applications so they could extend the friends list (and other functionality) onto a these sites/applications. For example, The popular iPhone application UrbanSpoon uses FC to allow users to interact with Facebook friends via posting reviews/photos, voting, etc. Another example is Techcrunch.com uses FC to extend blog comments made on their site out to the users Facebook news feed.
OpenSocial (OS)
OpenSocial is a Google Project still in alpha development that is very similar to FC in terms of functionality and goals, yet it applies non-proprietary open standards as the core horsepower. Big news when OS was originally announced in 10/2007 and still exciting news now as just about all popular social networks have adopted OS as their technology choice. The list as of this posting includes Google (Orkut), LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Oracle, Salesforce, Ning, Myspace, Plaxo, Yahoo, and others.
OS is based upon HTML and Javascript. Most importantly, all those great Facebook applications built using the FC toolset can easily be modified to work with OS. No need for developers to choose – they can do both.
In a nutshell forward thinking digital leaders recognize that consumption of content by users is not going to happen only from a core website. The notion of multiple access points and multiple sets of front-end pages (computer with a web browser, iPhone, Social Networks, a Refrigerator, etc.) powered by single back-end is the right solution.
