community

First experience with Google Friend Connect on my WordPress blog

December 5, 2008 By Dan Thornton

You may have spotted an interesting new widget on the right side of the site, under the search box. And you’d probably have spotted it’s an example of Google Friend Connect, released into the wild!

If you haven’t heard about Google and Facebooks rival attempts to provide a way to carry a single identity around the internet, engaging with communities at each stopping point, then I’d be a little surprised! Facebook Connect is also now available to anyone, having been opened to anyone today, after a period of testing on a limited number of sites. The third option is all of this is OpenID which has been around a while. The idea of not being tied to a single company is appealing, but it all honesty, I’ve often found OpenID can be a bit of a pain as a user if you forget which site logins count, or have to go through a creation process. It shouldn’t be hard, and the individual steps aren’t rocket science, but for some reason I’ve always found it a pain

Installing Google Friend Connect on a WordPress Blog:

Whereas the instructions for Facebook Connect involve creating HTML files in specific locations and will take a little bit of confidence, installing Google Friend Connect on a host WordPress Blog is incredibly easy. Once you’ve been accepted to use it, you download two html files, which you then upload to the top level of your hosted blog. Then once Google has checked it can find them, you’ve given access to the limited number of widgets already available – which you can install by copying and pasting the code in the ‘Text Widget’ option in your WordPress Dashboard.

In fact, the only thing that slowed me up was adjusting the height and width to make sure it fitted the right hand column!

Initial Thoughts:

I spent the morning reading the comprehensive look at Google Friend Connect by Neville Hobson and took the chance to try it out from a pure user’s perspective – it took me a couple of seconds to work out how to use my standard Google profile – strangely it isn’t the default – and also how to add my first friend – Robin Grant from We Are Social had turned up moments before me!

All well and good, but the interaction available by the community widget is pretty limited to adding someone – there was mention of being able to see them across all sites,but having added the widget here, I can’t see any way to contact, invite or interact with Robin and get him to come and display his proud membership of TheWayoftheWeb. (He might turn up if I tag this post with his name!)

There is also a comments widget which I may have a play with shortly – the question is whether that detracts from comments on the end of each individual post, and leads to something with no context – or whether it provides a place for general comments and communication which benefits the site as a whole, and doesn’t interfere with specific responses.

There’s also a review and rate gadget, which looks quite useful, but not really applicable for this blog unless I want people to be rating the entire site, and a very simple demo game.

I know there’s going to be a lot more coming, and the fact it works so flawlessly in the current basic iteration is definitely a good thing – I’ve just got a lot of questions about what will be happening in the future, and how it will help more interaction and connectivity to benefit the site. How do I use it to make friends with people via other instances, and then suggest they might like to visit, for example?

There are widgets which do that already, such as MyBlogLog, (owned by Yahoo) which displays any registered users in the order they visit. The main difference is that any interaction is done via the MyBlogLog site, which works OK, but it isn’t effective to ask me to leave the site I’m enjoying to go and connect, and then come back again. Whoever wins the ID war out of the three main players, I suspect services like MyBlogLog will be the first to be caught in the crossfire.

Big implications for sites with registration and data revenues

The other area of interest for me will be around data – obviously a site like mine doesn’t require membership or monetise data – but a lot of mid to large sized websites are using data capture as a significant revenue stream. If everyone is using Google Friend Connect as their preferred community, and it’s not available on a large site, it may stop them from wanting to interact – and if it is available, there’s currently no real data available that I can see in the administration area, aside from total number of members.

This could leave a lot of sites in a very tricky position – do they accept the loss of data to allow community, or do they risk isolation by trying to keep a valuable revenue stream?

And they’ll need to decide quickly, because Facebook has a large audience as an incentive, plus integration into Facebook news feeds etc. Meanwhile Google not only has a Googlopoly on search, but most smaller sites and blogs are incredibly familiar and at home with Google Adsense, meaning it’s a familiar working relationship.

If anyone has any details on the data side of things for Google or Facebook’s services, I’d be really interested to find out more.

‘The Supermarket effect’, and how to minimise it…

November 18, 2008 By Dan Thornton

I’ve coined the term ‘the supermarket effect’ in conversation and in passing, and never really publicly defined it. So for future reference:

The Supermarket Effect: The initial response to a new layout to a website, which echoes your first reaction to a supermarket changing it’s layout; ‘Oh, for crying out loud, where have they put the sodding milk’. Despite the fact that the change may actually be an improvement.

Chinese supermarket by gab on Flickr (CC Licence)

Even after a decade of making, changing, relaunching and tweaking websites, I’m as guilty of letting myself have the same reaction occasionally, before taking a deep breathe and evaluating what the changes actually mean.

And that effect can be devastating when you’re just launched a design you (or your team) worked on for days or weeks, and the first responses from users is to complain about every change. But if you understand that a percentage of shock is inevitable, you can start to seperate the valid and constructive comments from those of surprise – just remember that if they’re regular users of the site, it’s akin to walking into your local pub, or you living room, and finding someone has moved everything.

But there are ways you can minimise ‘the supermarket effect’.

Warn users that change is coming. Give them time to prepare themselves.
Explain in detail to key users what the changes will be, why they are being made, and give them an advanced preview. Get them onside, and they will evangelise the changes on a personal level which you wouldn’t reach as quickly.
Use A/B testing to reveal the changes to a small group and evaluate which changes are making the important differences.
Consider changing in phases, or offering a choice of old and new. Eventually you’ll have to force the late adopters across but it gives some of your audience a chance to get used to the new layout and help the latecomers.
Don’t dismiss the responses – even those which are purely critical of any change – politely explain the reasoning behind the changes, and the evaluation of them.

One famous example of reaction to change was Facebook’s unveiling of a new design. It led to vehement opposition, but over time, people do accept the changes, as long as there is value in making them for users. And if not – why are you making the change?

So are there other ways you can make a substantial change to your website, and minimise ‘the supermarket effect’?

Two good excuses to invest in printed materials…

November 13, 2008 By Dan Thornton

It’s very rare I purchase a book. The last two were Tribes by Seth Godin, and Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur” by Richard Branson, both of which have a lot to teach anyone in business and in social media marketing.

(Incidentally, after writing about Business Stripped Bare, here, a nice young lady named Natalie emailed me to say that there’s a widget to display the first 43 pages of the book, which you can see here. Meanwhile, my thoughts on Tribes and how to get it for free, or just 95p on iTunes are here.)

Anyhow, if you prefer to read from a printed page than a computer screen, then there are two more additions that I can recommend investing in.

The first is Dave Cushman’s The Power of the Network, which collects his white papers and more into a single download for 49p, or in printed form for £4.98 via print-on-demand site Lulu. (Disclosure – Dave is a former colleague and friend of mine – enough that I’m credited in the book!). Well worth reading – or buying for someone who is interested in how social media is changing. It’s particularly interesting due to Dave’s lengthy experience as a print journalist and sub-editor before his ever increasing adoption and insight into the changes multimedia is having on everything around us. He’s running a blogger review programme – and also giving any profits to Kiva, which allows you to fund people to change their lives and make their own way out of poverty.

The second is Jonathan MacDonald’s Every Single One of Us: Vol 1 The Communication Ideal, which looks at the underlying principles and makes bold predictions for the future advertising, marketing and personal brands – and is relevant for anyone in the media, internet and mobile industries. (Disclosure: I’m a very small part of a distinguished list who were involved in supporting and helping it’s creation). Jonathan’s CV speaks for itself! Plus he’s probably the closest thing to a legitimate social media rock star, thanks to his musical talents. It’s a £2.99 download or £14.95 for the print edition, and all the money is going into a collective pot to continue the concepts he’s building as part of a group. You can see it explained in a far better way, here.

Actually, cobblers to it and I’ll add a couple more – Joseph Jaffe is offering a very special deal for people buying certain amounts of his books Life After the 30 Second Spot and Join The Conversation (I’m a big fan of Join the Conversation), ranging from signed copies to a day’s consulting. Take a look at the offer on his blog, Jaffe Juice.

Now I know a lot of people reading this will probably have heard of these people, read their blogs and be familiar with their work (or at least you should!), but the print editions are perfect educational materials for anyone who still associates a ‘blog’ as being something where a geek talks about how he sits at home on his Xbox, talking to his virtual friends. This might help them realise that in the modern world, everyone is doing it via mobile, internet, their console – and that to really be a geek you’d have to go much further. That’s why I love the fact that Seth Godin references the term Otaku, which I’m familiar with due to my love of video games and Japanese culture. It’s for anyone with an almost obsessive interest in something, whether that’s social media, videogames, motorcycling, football or anything else.

There’s a great William Gibson quote from the Observer used at the end of the Wikipedia article:

‘The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age’s embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today’s interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku -hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.’

So go and buy some presents for the Otaku who don’t realise that’s what they are, and how the web can empower their interests, specialities, and dreams.

(And seeing as I’ve got the books, I’ll have a smart phone, a net book, an MP3 player and a new car stereo please!)

Jamie Oliver: Britain’s best marketing case study?

September 30, 2008 By Dan Thornton

As I’ve said before, I don’t watch much broadcast television these days, but I made an effort to catch Jamie’s Ministry of Food after seeing some of the trailers and the fact it was flagged by Mark Earls.

And I’m glad I did, because it’s probably the first time the principles of community marketing (See also Word of Mouth marketing etc), have been played out on national television! If you’ve been looking for an effective case study, this is definitely one to watch.

The premise is simple. To try and get the people of Rotherham to start cooking healthy food rather than living on takeaways. But rather than an advertising campaign, the plan was to teach 8 people how to cook on the understanding they’d pass the recipes to 2 more people. And in 15 steps, they’d reach the 260,000 population of Rotherham.

As Mark says, it’s a template for HERD marketing:

1. focus on what you can do not what you can say
2. …on what you can give folk out there to do…
3. …that they can do with each other
4. …oh, and make it highly visible and oh, yes fun

But there’s even more that I picked up on. One of the things Jamie started by saying was that he had to listen to start with. Sound familiar?

He also picked a woman who had undermined his School Dinners campaign by taking chip shop orders through the school fence, and picked her out as a key influencer . Time will tell whether he picked the right influencer!

And he’s already worrying about the speed and scaleability of the approach (Shel Isreal on scalability). He can see the positive effect he’s had on the 8 people he’s engaged, and the fact they’ve already ahd improvements to the way they live and act. But he’s got three months to transform a whole town. Sounds like the dilemma of showing a Return on Investment!

And finally there’s the fact he’s attempting to do something positive with this approach. Something that various people within the social media wrld have worried isn’t happening because most people are aiming for fame within the media/marketing/online sphere – and outside of it, things aren’t being affected by the new ways of marketing, communicating and conversing. (I’m struggling to find the appropriate link right now, so will add it later!)

If nothing else, it prompted me to exorcise some blog guilt. I’ve been tackling reports, budgets and plans, and I’m up to my neck in data and Excel spreadsheets, hence the slight lack of posts. But hopefully things should be more consistent again now.