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There’s a lot of ways to slice and dice the implementation of social technologies – especially when you’re talking about strategies for websites. Recommendations are a dime a dozen and some will cost you just as much. On the other hand, doing it wrong can cost you a heck of a lot more.

Jeremiah Owyang took a look at some of the approaches from some big brands during a recent keynote at the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco. 

What I tell clients is pretty simple. Spend the time to figure out where your customers are and plan your approach around how to interact. The good news is that a lot of the technology that helps you interact online is improving rapidly. With Facebook’s newer integration choices, federated commenting capabilities and real-time Twitter streams, there’s a bevy of options — an a-la-carte for online interactions if you will

And as Owyang points out toward the end, make sure you have some plans to sustain all this stuff. I’d say be vigilant about mapping your resources to the specific outcomes you’re trying to achieve. That’ll force you to look at the skill sets of your employees and match things up effectively. And overcompensate and pad things a bit..you’ll need the extra horsepower because your customers are scaling a lot faster than you are.

There was an article in the New York Times a few days back that highlighted an interesting storyline. The piece was inspired by a panel at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco titled, “How Web publishers can be successful without Google.”

I had a different title for this post, but instead used the content from a recent tweet from Eric Goldstein, the CEO of Amplify. BTW, it was embedded using Twitter’s new Blackbird Pie feature — and made much simpler with a new plug-in for Windows Live Writer. 

As far as the article, I don’t think many doubt the traffic spikes these days from social sites, but  I thought a more interesting debate was the last paragraph.

“publishers should “control their own destiny,” by trying to keep people on their own sites for as long as possible, and getting people coming back more often to look for information.”

On one hand you can say, yeah, but they’re big publishers, so their needs are extra special. I’m not so sure. I think it’s a bit naive to think any media company or digital entity will shape a strategy around “getting people coming back more often.” I’m not saying that’s not part of the core intent — of course it is — it has more to do with all the other lightweight conversations,syndications, and social shares happening.

I think the digital approach (publishers or otherwise) has to be one that takes these interactions into account and layers the right engagement strategy around each. Even if a user isn’t directly interacting with your hub (homepage) that doesn’t mean their importance is any less. The macro trend around social sharing is evidence of that.

Some of a brand’s biggest connectors and advocates likely don’t see ACME’s home page very much..they’re off-site curating and editing links and content that are ultimately the lubricant that brings users back to a brand or publisher’s website. That shouldn’t upset you too much.

“For example, newspaper and magazine publisher Hearst is seeing traffic from social media sites grow at a 250% annual rate, said Heidi Perry of Share This, a company that integrates sharing capability into thousands of big and small publishers, including Hearst.

Users who find content through social media tend to stick around longer and are more valuable, argued the panelists. That’s one reason so many of them are latching on to Facebook’s new “like” function, which not only gives users a way to share and interact with content, but also helps publishers’ content show up in Facebook’s own search function.

Read more at blogs.wsj.com

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There’s a ton of activity in real-time collaboration these days. With Office looming and IBM’s social push with LotusLive, companies have a lot more options when it comes to social computing and collaboration tools.

One of the companies with an increasingly attractive option is California-based Central Desktop. TechCrunch reported on some of its moves recently and I wanted to chip in with a few observations.

I’ve had some exposure to some of Central Desktop’s earlier incarnations and always liked its simplicity and pervasive use of RSS, essentially making everything a feed. And we all know [a little snarky] that feeds are the new inbox, right? But even early on, you got the sense that Isaac Garcia and company had a good handle on how syndicating everything could reap big benefits. It was one of the few platforms I used that brought RSS plumbing to the common user.

More importantly, Central Desktop brings real workflows and simple processes into its collaborative environment. When that’s exposed to users early on, most can quickly grasp how the tool can accommodate the way they work, not the other way around. That’s big.

As far as the industry goes, prospects for some of the stronger pure-plays look good, with several probably ripe for acquisition over the next 6-12 months.

Competitively, the collaboration road is much tougher for the smaller vendors to travel down these days, with larger enterprise vendors lurking at every bend.

But Central Desktop, Box.net and others can still carve out a niche in what’s increasingly a hybrid enterprise environment. IBM’s Cast Iron acquisition a few days back is evidence that on-premise and cloud solutions will continue to coexist for some time. It’s that heterogeneous environment that makes solutions from pure-play cloud vendors so compelling. Clearly, there’s more to just dropping in a SaaS-based solution, but they typically require less overhead than on-premise offerings.

And heck, if Central Desktop can capture even a small percentage of SharePoint-wannabe customers with tight pocketbooks, they’ll have more than a few good quarters ahead of them.

Central Desktop’s tool allows users to simultaneously co-author Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents in real time, as well as open and save files directly into the cloud.

Central Desktop says that their tool brings document collaboration to older versions of Office at a much lower cost than upgrading to the new version of Office.

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The Tribune had an article recently highlighting how brands are wrapping Twitter into customer service activities.

AT&T chimed in here

“AT&T not only maintains a presence on Facebook and Twitter, but employs a full “blogger relations” team and utilizes YouTube.
“These are not PR people, they are real customer care managers who spend their days helping people via social media,” Roskopf said. “Posting on Facebook or tweeting will get you a fast response..”

And here’s one of the ways the ‘no frills’ bunch frames it.

“Twitter and Facebook are a great way to have your voices heard and a great way to voice a concern,” said Christi Day, an emerging media strategy specialist at Southwest Airlines. “I would say it is a large part of our customer communication strategy.”
The Dallas-based airline has two employees devoted to its Twitter page, and a team of three who monitor its Facebook fan page.

Every time I see these types of pieces, I think  of the handful of first-hand experiences I’ve had.

Not surprisingly, Comcast was the first real experience, followed by State Farm insurance and most recently Esurance. Most notably was the set of scenarios with State Farm.

My parents were flat out turned down for a new roof after it was destroyed by the hurricane a few years back. Of course I started venting a tad on Twitter for starters, and subsequently moved the conversation to their Facebook page.

Within a few weeks my parents were contacted by a ’special agent’ and magically the roof was replaced soon thereafter. Not trying to be big-man-on-campus by flexing my Twitter muscle, just pointing out how things have changed..whether you have 7, 7000, or 7 million followers is beside the point.  Companies now are listening. They have to. And it’s about time.

Lastly, as a sidebar that the techie in me couldn’t help but notice. Why is the Tribune still running their site on TypePad? It’s a wonder its newsroom can turn a profit after figuring in what it takes to maintain it.

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Noted VC Fred Wilson had a good post this morning, urging the Twitter community to get the creative juices flowing. He outlined five areas where additional growth would most likely occur.

Perhaps the most intriguing are the Enterprise and Vertical segments. Wilson references CoTweet, who merged with ExactTarget recently, and alludes to Chatter from Salesforce as the standouts thus far.That’s a strikingly bare bin considering Twitter launched almost five years ago.

If that activity points to anything, I think it’s that cumbersome CRM applications are quickly becoming a thing of the past. In some ways, the activity stream has replaced the CRM-based message.

Furthermore, if you look at the newer breed of social software entrants, much of their approach is rooted in lighter-weight tools and plug-ins – perfectly suited for Twitter’s API and evolving framework. Gone are the days of big back-ends and custom connector architectures. The mantra is loud and clear now — coexist and ease in to my enterprise accordingly.

Also, one enterprise company I thought was conspicuously absent in Wilson’s enterprise group was Yammer. It’s hard to point to another company that’s had as much influence inside corporations as Yammer. I think its recent push into customized communities (think external extranets) paints at least a partial picture of where things may be headed – a blurring of the lines between internal and external communities. That’s a huge opportunity that no one’s cracked that I’m aware of.

And I doubt anyone you know could name one vertical player in the Twitter ecosystem a la Stocktwits. It’s safe to assume one will likely emerge from advertising or marketing as social commerce continues to grow.

The real opportunities in that space will be helping brands harvest intelligence from the flurry of online engagement that will happen in distributed networks.

Below are Wilson’s five areas.

* Social Gaming – There have been a number of attempts to build social game experiences on Twitter. But I’m not aware of any successes of scale like we’ve had on the Facebook platform. I think we will see it emerge soon.

* Verticals – We have some successes to point to here like Stocktwits for finance and Flixup for movies but this is a wide open opportunity in most verticals and we haven’t seen as much effort here as I’d have expected.

* Enterprise – CoTweet comes to mind as well as the efforts that Salesforce has made to integrate Twitter. This is a huge opportunity.

* Discovery – This is one area where there is a significant amount of effort.Hunch, Listorious, TweetMeme, Cadmus, WeFollow, and MrTweet all come to mind.

* Analytics – While Twitter will obviously be delivering better analytics to its users, particularly its marketing and business users

The thing I like about SocialCast’s approach is their lightweight strategy, dropping in around existing apps and platforms as needed.

Eric Schonfeld described their approached recently around the company’s  funding announcement

The startup’s service combines a corporate activity stream that ties into CRM and ERP systems with social bookmarking, Outlook and SharePoint integrations, mobile (iPhone and Blackberry) and desktop (Air) apps, and analytics.

The bigger software vendors will own the foundation for collaborative technologies — it’s smarter to coexist and deliver information in a platform-agnostic way.

I also noticed mention of an AIR and mobile app, which is equally smart. There’s a contingency of users that will drive adoption outside of the internal portal with mobile and desktop apps alone.

No offense to John Yemma, editor of the CS Monitor, but besides the SEO optimization and its experimentation with a “weekly,” I didn’t see much related to how his publication is innovating. There’s a ton of folks I see saying the same thing. You need a hybrid model. Know your audience. Experiment. The list goes on. What’s lacking is real evidence of what works. And why is that? I submit that a big reason is because it’s early folks. Just like radio and television evolved, the commercial internet is less than twenty years old and the reality remains very few (if any) have been successful monetizing content.  

It’s convenient to be dismissive of the pay wall when you view it as a huge Wall of China blockade. OK, maybe that’s a bad example with Google’s current backdrop, but the point is that pay walls will likely exist in many forms — micro-registrations, metered sections, or daily and weekly subscriptions.

The weekly and monthly charges aren’t any different than what cable and other providers charge for just “accessing” content. As the demand for relevancy (think search) continues to occupy more of our time, quality journalism will demand a higher premium. That’s why it’s so important for media companies to be experimenting — now. Yemma’s right, however, about where differentiations will come from: timely delivery and putting the audience first.

How are we using technology to create a more relevant product? We’re not going to “save” media by out-featuring each other. We can and will re-cement media by using the technology to deliver the experience consumers want most: intelligent, meaningful news that’s accessible where they are in the moment.

If publishers execute on those two things effectively, pay wall variations become a hell of a lot easier (and transparent) to climb. When media companies figure out the right formula for assembling teams that can produce and deliver quality content to any platform at any time on any device, hide your wallet.

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I didn’t set the DVR last night for this PBS segment, but I’ve embedded some of it in this post. Robert Scoble commented a few days back that he’d seen the program and said it was quite good. Nice job by PBS making things so easily embeddable.

Two Thousand and Ten Digital Marketing Outlook

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It’s easy to dismiss MySpace when folks discuss the big social portals but with the music biz in upheaval and with MySpace’s leverage there, the next six to twelve months could be telling. As streaming takes hold, [video, music] it looks like MySpace is pretty well positioned with iLike and iMeem already in the acquisition hopper.

What’s more interesting will be how the ramifications of Facebook Connect play out as millions of users look to it as the de facto "roving profile" if you will. I did see MySpace is letting users use Facebook Connect, which is smart, but how it handles overlapping apps and services will be challenging. And don’t forget, Murdoch owns MySpace and there’s some big battles brewing over pay walls and monetization.

Think of the implications if Murdoch had some success circumventing Google and yanking his content out from under the Google algorithm. That would make MySpace way more attractive to other media companies and even Bing.

Below is the excerpt I pulled from TechCrunch, clearly amplifying the continued push to focus on its core.

We’re hearing that the cuts are part of a restructuring of technology and product that’s being conducted by Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn and Chief Technology Officer Alex Maghen. Both are still fairly new to the company — Hirschhorn joined last April as part of the massive MySpace top management reshuffle, and Maghen joined in September. Hirschhorn, in particular, has made no secret of his desire to kill off products that no longer fit with MySpace’s core strategy.

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One of the things I like about Ogilvy’s thoughts is how they make it clear that social media isn’t owned by one department or the other. That ownership volley is what costs too many companies precious time. It’s much easier to rally the business units that want to step up and commit resources and budget.

The other thing that stood out is Ogilvy’s Social Enterprise Change Framework. There’s simply not enough frameworks out there to anchor how companies can begin thinking about an interactive strategy. Hell, I still reference Forrester’s POST methodology for some of the sessions I’ve run. What the Ogilvy framework smartly outlines are the steps required for brands to establish “Centers of Excellence” – yes the COE is back. And it actually maps really well to the challenges I see in the marketplace. Without sharing the burden – ok,tasks – companies are easily victimized by the silo effect and just can’t scale social media expertise across the organization.

The “Action” step in the diagram shows how talent needs to be peppered throughout the organization. Which lines of business to start with can often be the most daunting exercise. It’s hard to look inward and admit your customer service sucks needs improvement, although half the Twitterverse probably already knows it.

And while “action” is the right word in this context, I’m seeing companies act with more preciseness these days, as if engagement strategies were planned for long-term sustainability. I know, what a concept, right? Part of it’s from earlier social media war wounds  and part of it’s due to the listening capabilities that are now utilitarian. What the Ogilvy whitepaper also largely underscores is how twenty-ten will be year that social media’s shiny new object affliction is finally cured.

Ogilvy Enterprise Social Media v1 0

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

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Image by cambodia4kidsorg via Flickr

One of the other quotes that stood out was John Batelle’s prediction that the microblogging interface would change and “look nothing like a microblog.” I’d guess that has  a lot to do with the interface disappearing in some respects. By that I mean interfaces will be accessed through all sorts of services, applications and embedded widgets. And in a sense I think it’s already changed pretty drastically.

The other thing that almost everyone seems to allude to is how social media will become more entrenched in the inner-workings of companies – from their external communication practices to the way business systems are built, designed and deployed. 

That last part is why you hear so much about “social business,” which is a really tough thing to distill into something folks can understand.

If you stray too far to the technical, toolset, or process side, you sound like a business process re-engineering (BPR) evangelist. Jump over too much to the “social media” side and you quickly run the risk of being categorized as too fluffy or someone trying to socialize things that really don’t need to be social.

2010 Social Media Influencers – Trend Predictions in 140 Characters, by TrendsSpotting