Vidya Shivkumar is director of products at Janrain and has built and shipped consumer, B2B and B2C products and services for over a decade.
Online behavior tracking has been successfully employed for nearly a decade, but its tools do not uniquely identify users, and rightfully so. Tracking was only designed to group users into audience segments; for example, golden retriever owners who live in San Francisco, CA, or baseball and wine enthusiast females in their 30s who live in Seattle, WA.
Of course, certain laws restrict combining offline data sources with online user behavior tracking. Therefore, how do brands get to know users individually, rather than as one of many in an audience segment?
Require a social network login to access your website. You request permission to access visitors’ social profiles and, when approved, you’ll have an opportunity to build a wealth of knowledge on the individual user. Learn about their hobbies and interests, friends, likes, age, marital status, places visited and alma mater. And the best part is that your users have consciously opted to share this information with you.
Obtaining the user’s social profile data is the first step. The following tips detail how to access rich social profile information, while avoiding some of the challenges associated with data gathering.
Social profile data is complex and dynamic. Depending on the particular social network, the data can range from professional affiliations, education history, friends lists, current location and checkins.
Social profile data is useful only if actionable. A copious amount of user data is worthless if you are unable to feed it to existing systems such as email marketing tools or content personalization engines.
Social profile data is relevant only when combined with other data sources. Social does not have to replace what you already know about your users. The real win is augmenting existing intelligence with this new, valuable social data source.
Let’s also look at five critical considerations for collecting, storing and managing social profile data.
1. Structure and Discipline
Consider hosting data in a flexible and extensible schema. This will ensure that data has rules and constraints placed around it. For example, verify that an email address is unique and accurate, that date of birth follows a consistent format, that zip code and phone number, if mandatory, are present, etc.
2. Multi-Channel Support
According to Nielsen, smartphones make up over 40% of all mobile phones in the U.S., and smartphone owners are three times more likely to access the Internet via their handsets. Brands are catching onto this trend by offering both web and mobile experiences for their users.
Unify user intelligence across multiple devices and channels, for example, mobile devices, networked kiosks, trusted partner sites and campaign landing pages. Future-proof now, so you don’t need to re-architect when the next digital experience arises.
3. Availability, Redundancy and Backup
Like any other user databases, social profile storage systems need to be available 24/7. They should be supported by enterprise-class service-level agreements (SLAs), be backed up so that data is not lost in the event of catastrophic disk failures, and most importantly, be redundant to minimize service interruptions.
4. “Don’t Make the User Think”
Those of us who have conceived of, built and launched a registration system know that screens and workflow are crucial components to data collection. After all, a well-designed interface can make or break your data collection plans. But they take time to build and get right. (My company has estimated that a default workflow for capturing, editing and displaying social data takes up to 19 screens!)
Today, no profile system is complete without a public and a private profile page. Users have come to expect a page in which they can manage their settings for the data they share with your brand. Also, if your site offers community features such as blogs, reviews or comments, users want to be able to manage their public persona via a public profile page. Last but not least, users expect branded interfaces so they know who is managing their data.
5. Third-Party Access
Now let’s look at things to consider when making social data usable and actionable. Most brand marketers want to use social data, at a minimum, to power their targeted email marketing programs. Others want to use the data for onsite personalization, such as serving relevant news articles, displaying merchandise, or even promoting concert tickets relevant a user’s interests.
When you combine social data with legacy or traditional user data, you build a 360-degree perspective about your users. However, not all third-party tools need to know everything in your database to operate effectively. For instance, an email marketing tool may only need access to first and last names, email addresses, interests and zip codes for a segment of mountain climbers in Portland, OR. Thanks to protocols such as OAuth, building such capabilities into a registration system is now possible.
Given that marketers need to be able to customize and change their marketing segments often, this type of segment creation must be easy to set up via a dashboard, and should not require a database administrator, a web programmer and an operations team to roll out.
Visitors to your site are showing up with a wealth of information that you can leverage to improve the onsite experience. The critical element for marketers is to have the right tools in place to request, store and manage users’ social profile data for meaningful purposes. The more ubiquitous these tools become, the more users will demand engagement and personalization on your site.
While still at Facebook, Asana co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein developed a prototype task manager that helps groups cut down on email chains and meetings. After watching the prototype take off within Facebook, they left the giant social network that Moskovitz helped found and continued developing what would become Asana. Now they’re introducing that collaboration tool to the world by opening it to the public for the first time.
Asana, which has been in private beta for about a year, is a free, single-shared task list for groups. It helps everybody on a team keep track of what they and others are working on without what the startup has termed “work about work,” or unnecessary logistical conversations.
“People ask us, ‘Is this a to do list?’” Rosenstein says. “We’re like ‘No, this is the to do list.’”
What sets Asana apart from dozens of other task manager programs, he says, is real-time updates, flexibility to fit any project’s work flow and simplicity that makes updating Asana quicker than updating a Word document. That, and the fact that Asana wants to be seen more like email than corporate software: a go-to organization method for everything from class projects to small companies.
A tangle of startups have attempted to streamline project communications — corporate or otherwise — but haven’t breached mainstream adoption. That doesn’t seem to faze Moskovitz and Rosenstein.
“The reason there are a million of these out there is the same reason that before Facebook, there were a million social networks and before Google, there were a million search engines,” Moskovitz says.
In other words, despite an environment of email overload that demands an efficient group collaboration product, nobody has delivered the right one yet.
For Facebook, the prototype that inspired Asana turned out to be just right. Moskovitz and Rosenstein say the social network is still using the prototype to manage projects.
Since becoming Asana, the same idea that inspired that prototype has become a full product, transformed from something focused on power users to something that anybody can pick up in a few minutes and spawned a complementary mobile site. It’s not something that’s designed for a large company like Facebook — though the startup says that such a premium product is on the roadmap.
The second company that Moskovitz co-founded could transform the workspace with a task-oriented product the same way that his first transformed the social space with a people-oriented one.
Or, it could become one more to-do list program that managers pressure employees to update weekly — a Friendster rather than a Facebook.
QR codes are a great way of instantly sharing information with a quick camera snap? QREncoder is app for your Mac that'll let you quickly and easily generate them for printing, uploading and sharing.
You can encode almost any sort of text into a QR code: a URL, phone number, text message, email address, twitter handle -- maybe even a haiku. QREncoder makes creating codes easy. Fire up the app, select the type of code you want, and bung your text in the box.
You've got a choice of size for your QR code, 5, 6, 9 and 12px and you can save it as a PNG for later use.
QREncoder is quick, easy to use and free from the Mac App Store, so is well worth checking out if you want to create quick response codes.
Touch Arcade has some good and bad news for fans of classic PC RPGs out there. The bad news is that the expected Elite Collection (which was set to come out last week and round up some of old developer Elite Systems' best games on iOS, has been delayed due to some rights issues. One of the companies involved that had previously agreed to share its games decided instead to claim a trademark at the last minute, which will hold up the process for a while, perhaps only a week or two.
The good news, however, is that that extra time will allow the folks behind the apps to add in some extra titles, which TA presumes are some really amazing Interplay games, including The Bard's Tale and the great RPG Wasteland. That would be awesome -- almost all of Interplay's old titles are classics, and it'd be great to get those up and running on iOS devices.
We'll see -- Elite is still working on getting everything together, but as I said, news should be out in the next couple of weeks. Here's hoping iOS gamers get their hands on this great collection soon.
Balakrishna Narasimhan leads solution marketing for Appirio, a cloud solution provider that helps enterprises adopt, connect and extend cloud platforms such as salesforce.com, Google and Workday. Follow him on Twitter: @bnara75
With Google+’s unique features for search, selective sharing and rich communication, it offers consumers a very different user experience than the established social networks. For individuals, Google+ has quickly become a great place to build your interest graph — that is, find the latest content and people related to topics you’re interested in.
With its seamless integration with Google Apps, Google+ promises a very different type of social enterprise experience. In fact, Google+ has five unique advantages over other social business platforms.
1. Smart Integration With Existing Google Apps
Google+ is fully integrated with Google Apps. As a user, you don’t need a new login — it’s just another tab like mail, calendar, docs or video. Most business users spend their day in mail or calendar, so a tool that’s easily accessible from the daily workflow has advantages over third-party software.
Thinking a bit ahead of where the product is, the possibilities that are opened up by the integration with Google Apps are pretty exciting. You can imagine “+1” buttons and rich collaboration across sites, docs, spreadsheets, presentations, blogs, videos, photos and more. Or imagine working within a doc and starting a hangout with collaborators while sharing your screen. For companies using Google Apps, taking advantage of these features would require no additional software, logins or changes in behavior.
2. Google+ Already Knows a Lot About You
Because of its tight integration with Google Apps, Google+ could take advantage of what it already knows about each business user, including whom they email, how often and how recently, as well as the topics they write about and search for. Google+ is in a position to help an enterprise user not only quickly build out his internal circles, but also discover those outside the company who are talking about the same topics or industry. If Google chooses to pursue this, it would make a great tool to help each user build out broad interest-based professional networks.
3. Google+ Is Uniquely Positioned to Help You Find and Share Interesting Content
Nobody has a better index of what’s on the web than Google. So nobody is better positioned to help you find interesting content and people from both inside and outside your company. Google+ Sparks let you follow the latest from the web on topics you’re interested in, and one can imagine something similar within your domain. Internal Sparks could let you quickly find content and experts within your company on work-related topics you’re most interested in.
4. Google+ Integrates Public and Private Sharing
Unlike other social enterprise platforms, which keep most shared content behind company walls, Google+ integrates public and private sharing. When I’m using Google+, I can decide for each post whether I want to share it with my colleagues, my clients, or certain subsets of either category. Also, because a number of websites have already embedded +1 buttons, it’s easy to “like” content from across the web and share it with targeted groups.
5. Android Phones Sync Easily With the Entire Apps Suite
Finally, an Android mobile phone brings this complete integration to users on the go. Activating Android handsets with your company’s Google Apps account brings all this productive and social functionality to the palm of your employees’ hands. And the wide variety of devices and carriers means greater flexibility.
A Video Explanation of Google+
The Google+ project: A quick look
Google provides an overview of the entire Google+ project.
Ideally you're always so excited about tackling your next task that the only motivation you need is another cup of coffee. Unfortunately we don't all live in that world, and sometimes we need a little help getting into gear. If all you need to motivate yourself is a simple reminder that the clock is ticking, Maker Eugene Baumstein's web-based 24-hour countdown clock does what it sounds like. More »
Congratulations Bright House Networks customers, your off-brand Time Warner Cable experience now includes live TV streaming on your iPad. The Bright House TV tablet app has hit iTunes and is, unsurprisingly, a direct clone of the TWCable TV app, although it's not the latest version as it doesn't have parental controls yet. Otherwise it's basically the same experience, complete with the restriction to using it at home on your own WiFi network and its initial unfriendliness towards jailbroken iPads. there's no word on which channels are available, but we wouldn't be surprised if they also mirror the Time Warner list. If you're jailbroken, check the MacRumors link below for a workaround, otherwise you can just head to iTunes and download the app directly.
[Thanks, EvilSpock]
Since Halloween weekend is currently in full swing (despite the snowy weather in the U.S. Northeast), we know many of you are probably busy modeling your costumes in front of your mirror in preparation for tonight’s festivities. Before you put your masks and wigs on, Mashable wants to share a roundup of the week’s special features with you.
From the Netflix downturn to the spooky Halloween tech-inspired pumpkins, this list has it all.
The year 2011 has never seen so many tech-inspired Halloween costumes. Homemade, assembled or bought, these costumes represent tech innovation and digital trends from the past and present.
Each week, we pick a popular song, find 10 covers of it and ask you to vote for your favorite. This time, we chose Foster The People’s “Pumped Up Kicks.” Which one do you like best?
Banks are not always known for their social media savvy, but these 5 examples show how a little Facebook outreach can go a long way for financial institutions.
How frequently should you post to your Facebook page? Check out these tricks and metrics to help boost your social engagement on the world’s largest social network.
Coldplay and Adele have opted not to have their albums available on Spotify and other streaming music services. Could this be a new trend with established artists?
Know Your Twitter Followers is an automated freemium service that allows any individual, company or brand immediate access to acquire a demographic analysis of their Twitter followers.
It was a busy week in the gadget world, and I’ve boiled it all down into the top 10 most unusual, groundbreaking, futuristic and just-plain-weird gadgets I could find for you, all wrapped up right here in a easily digested package.
I’m a bad person. I simply do not pay attention the way I used to, and it’s all because of technology, which constantly distracts me. How about you? Shall we blame technology?
The digital music revolution might have started in the late 1990s, but in the last few years, the way we find, share and organize music has undergone major changes.
Online entertainment as an all-streaming entertainment cornucopia is rapidly approaching. You might be surprised how quickly the transition is taking place.
The average patient sees 19 different doctors in his lifetime, and transferring paper records can be costly and dangerous. Cloud-based medical records are making doctors’ offices more efficient, one chart at a time.
Social media monitoring service Reppler surveyed more than 300 hiring professionals to determine when and how job recruiters are screening job candidates on different social media sites.
Most non-profit websites have some blog components — posting updates, news, photos, videos, etc. — to keep their fans informed. We dug a little deeper and found unique ways non-profits are sharing content.
Some have called Netflix’s recent travails merely a blip in an otherwise successful run. Others think Netflix’s current decline (which has now lasted for months) is unstoppable. We at Mashable have ideas for the company’s quick recovery.
Most 17 to 34-year-olds who came of age with the Internet don’t consume media and advertising the same way their parents did. If you want to reach them, you’ll need to note these key strategies.
Despite the alleged intentions of its board, as well as rumored interest from Google and Microsoft, momentum for a potential acquisition of Yahoo has stalled.
It might be scary to share all your online reviews, but some hotel and travel destinations have embraced social media chatter — good and bad — and seen surprising results.
There’s a lot to be learned from how the big brands handle their customers on social media channels. These 9 examples should be part of your customer service playbook.
rsk writes "Amazon Web Services' Elastic Load Balancer is a dynamic load-balancer managed by Amazon. Load balancers regularly swapped around with each other which can lead to surprising results; like getting millions of requests meant for a different AWS customer. Using ELBs can result in AWS unintentionally introducing a man-in-the-middle (attack) into your application environment. Most AWS users do not realize this can happen and have not secured against it."
James L. McQuivey, Ph.D. is a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research serving Consumer Product Strategy professionals. Follow him on Twitter at @jmcquivey.
Growing up in the ’70s, I was the world’s biggest fan of The Six Million Dollar Man. Every Sunday night at 7 p.m. you could find me glued to our Trinitron TV to watch Steve Austin battle every villain from Bionic Sasquatch to the evil Dr. Dolenz. The appeal of the show was simple: Amplified by technology, the Bionic Man is better, stronger, and faster than his enemies.
It turns out to be a morality tale for our own day. But you are not the bionic man in the drama I’m unfolding — you are his target. Because while you were carefully planning your business strategy, hundreds — if not thousands — of individuals and competitors have been exploiting technology to make themselves better, stronger, and faster than you.
We call these people digital disruptors. And they’re coming right for you.
No matter what industry you are in, you are their target. Where you could once dismiss digital disruption as the sole province of the music or other media industries where it destroyed billions in value, digital disruption has now expanded. These disruptors employ technologies — and the platforms they enable — to build better products than you can, establish a stronger customer relationship than you have, and deliver it all to market faster than you ever thought possible.
Oh, and it doesn’t cost anywhere close to six million dollars for them to get started. I offer Lose It! as one of many case studies worth considering. Targeting the weight loss and fitness business — one of the most analog industries on the planet — Lose It! is disrupting the more than $40 billion Americans spend on weight loss each year. It’s a costly industry to enter — think of Jenny Craig’s marketing budget alone, then add its hundreds of physical locations, prepared meals, and all the infrastructure to support the entire enterprise. So while franchises like The Biggest Loser have succeeded in entering this business recently, they have done so at great cost.
Meanwhile, a single app that helps dieters keep track of the calories they consume on their smartphones has gone from 0 to 7 million downloads in just a few years. FitNow, the company behind the app, pulled this off with four employees, establishing an unheard of customer-per-employee metric of 1.75 million.
This is digital disruption at its finest: better, stronger, faster. The app got to market quickly, partly because as a digital disruptor, FitNow could afford to launch something that didn’t try to solve all the problems in the weight-loss world. As Charles Teague, CEO, told me recently, “Let’s not pretend that we know the endgame here. Let’s do the least amount of features to know if it will work. Then improve it if people use it.” And improve it they have, adding fitness tracking and more recently a robust social community of like-minded dieters.
Because it sounds so easy, a CEO I shared this with asked me why, if digital is so quick and dirty, his company’s website redesign was over time and over budget. I told him it was precisely because he staffed up his business under assumptions about design and functionality that were true in 2005 but are no longer the case. Digital disruption has even disrupted the digital businesses that preceded them.
While digital disruptors are better, stronger, and faster, they are not untouchable. Their ease of entry comes from the fact that traditional barriers have fallen to zero. That means your direct cost to emulate their practices can also be low.
That’s why I recommend you steal the digital disruptor’s handbook. Use the iPad, the Kinect, and whatever platform is next to build a digital bridge to your customers. Like with Lose It!, your bridge must engage customers more often than your current product can, packaging and delivering benefits that you didn’t realize were part of your consumer contract because before now, they weren’t. You have to change your understanding of your product so you can then change your customer’s understanding of it as well. This will require better thinking than you currently do – I previously explained how digital disruptors take advantage of a type of thinking called “innovating the adjacent possible.” It’s crucial to generating more ideas more quickly so that you can find the nearby opportunities that will succeed while quickly culling those that will fail.
There’s more to do, but before you can even begin, you have to know: Are you ready to do this? Does your company have the energy, skills, and policies to turn into a disruptor or are you more likely to be displaced by the digital disruptor nearest you?