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TheWayoftheWeb Most Read Posts in 2011

December 24, 2011 By Dan Thornton

There’s still a week to go, but unless something radical happens, here’s a quick run-down of the most read posts I’ve written on this site in 2011. It’s purely in terms of visitor numbers via Google Analytics, so I’m resisting the temptation to try and promote posts that I felt may have been overlooked!

1. 2012 The Year of 3D Printing?

If anything, the coverage of 3D printing has only gained pace since I wrote this, and there have been several more developments with funding, new businesses based around the technology, and growing consumer awareness.

2. Problems embedding Youtube videos in WordPress?

With the roll out of new embedding tools from Youtube, Vimeo etc, it turned out that WordPress was stripping out the code whenever you tried to publish an embedded video. It’s since been corrected, but judging by the traffic, it wasn’t just me that was a bit puzzled by the fact I had to revert to the old code.

3. Feeling attacked on all sides

A popular post for freelancers and entrepreneurs which covered my feelings about setting up my own small businesses, and then seeing constant news about competitors and massive global corporations moving into similar areas. How do you work on a tiny marketing business when the ‘big boys’ are constantly unveiling new social media units?

4. Guy Kawasaki’s ‘Enchantment – The art of changing hearts, minds and intentions’

A review from back in February of what I think is one of the most useful books released this year.

5. Everyone’s a curator now

How content curation may be a new buzzword for the media industry, but everyone else is already doing it with their writing, photos and videos. How does that change the way we act with friends and family, or how we upload and share?

6. The two sides of 3D Printing

Two examples of current 3D Printing – one very positive, one perhaps very negative, which hopefully start people thinking how best to utilise the technology in benefitting us all, rather than just being impressed with the tech itself.

7. Why don’t Facebook fans like us anymore?

What turns people away from a company Facebook page, and also how to plan to fix it.

8. Klout and Peerindex: Social network loyalty cards

How Klout and Peerindex are initially mapping ‘influence’, and the result that they act as loyalty cards for the social networks they include, requiring you to do your daily posting on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ rather than using a competitor, for example. Add in the quantity factor as a part of their metrics, plus the perk offers as a reward, and they’re loyalty cards for digital services.

And I’d like thank you

I’d just like to give my heartfelt thanks and appreciation to everyone who has visited my site, subscribed to my feed, RT’d, Liked, or +’d a post, left a comment, stumbled, reddit’d, digg’d, or told their friends about TheWayoftheWeb.

Starting a blog or a business is incredibly tough, and sometimes we all forget to share how important it is when we see that someone has enjoyed what we do. I promise you that I still get as excited by seeing new readers, new comments, and new recommendations of what I do today as I did when I first started blogging. And even on the worst days, when I’m working alone at home and feeling like noone cares, it’s guaranteed someone will post a comment or share a post on Twitter, and it’ll fuel my determination and motivation for weeks.

So many thanks, Happy Christmas, and if I can help you in 2012, please do let me know…

Privacy, Frictionless Sharing, and Hasah Elahi

December 5, 2011 By Dan Thornton

I originally wrote about Hasan Elahi four years ago following an article in Wired, which described how he was incorrectly questioned by the FBI, and the Tracking Transcience project he began as a result to share everything about his life – where he was, what he was eating, his purchases etc. (My original post is here). Way before frictionless sharing became available to us all!

I thought it was worth sharing his recent TED talk which was queued up in my always growing list of videos to watch;

It’s something which is going to be a growing issues for more of us as ‘frictionless sharing’ and online lives are the easiest for people to track and interact with. Rather than trying to hide everything, perhaps overwhelming the systems with information is the more effective route, particularly, as Elahi points out, the various Government agencies in every country whose stock and trade is information. After all, ‘Everyone’s a curator now‘

Frictionless sharing and frictionless ambivalence

I’ve been looking at the rise of ‘frictionless sharing’ – exemplified by Spotify autoposting every song you play on Facebook. The insightful Chris Thorpe summed it up well with his blog post comparing it with frictionfull sharing.

What I really want and act upon is that one personal recommendation from someone I trust/respect/like for the one thing that really matters – a new song, a book, an article. Something that someone saw and though they absolutely had to share with me.

After all, I thought at this time of year it’s meant to be ‘the thought that counts’, and ‘it’s better to give than receive’. No thought goes into autoposting, and you’re giving me nothing – except a bunch of unfiltered noise alongside everyone else doing the same thing in my friends list.

Unless you’re doing it to devalue government information agencies, in which case you’re far more interesting than your choice in mainstream pop suggests…

Social network commerce and referrals: Rubbish in, rubbish out?

April 11, 2011 By Dan Thornton

Two recent studies into social networking referrals and Facebook ecommerce left me slightly perplexed until the obvious answer smacked me in the face.

The first was a study by ForeSee Results, which showed that 1% of website referrals came direct from a social networking url, and that’s after a survey of 188 websites and over 295,000 responses from individual consumers. The networks included ranged from Facebook and Twitter to the likes of Foursquare, Scribd and Meetup. Without being able to dig into the study, there are some initial questions (Inclusion of Twitter clients, and wouldn’t Foursquare and Meetup be primarily for offline referrals?)

The second was a Forrester report into Facebook Ecommerce, which looked into 24 companies, with 7% citing social networks as one of their most effective sources of customers (90% cited paid search marketing). And a 1% click through rate compared to an 11% rate for email marketing. 24 companies is a pretty small sample group, but hey-ho….

Why am I perplexed?

There are a lot of examples of sites revealing their referral figures from Facebook and Twitter (and the social networks themselves are keen to highlight how much traffic they drive). Those figures are always a lot higher than 1% – and my own sites back that up consistently since they first launched (Obviously I can’t reference client sites or previous employers…). Some other social networks have also made decent contributions to site traffic (e.g. Stumbleupon, Reddit, and several others), and some have never appeared to my knowledge (I’ve yet to see someone appear on this blog via Foursquare for obvious reasons).

So besides the aggregation problem – why is that 1% number so low?

And given 600 million potential consumers on Facebook with an integral sharing and recommendation mechanism, why aren’t more companies able to convert customers? Email marketing will generally perform well as potential customers have actively signed up for information and offers, and 1% is still better than many advertising campaigns can achieve, but surely it must be possible to engage fans and potential customers in a more effective way…

Rubbish in, rubbish out?

I haven’t had access to either survey, but certainly the publicly-available summaries and reports seem to have skipped a vital question – how many of the websites and retails involved are actually doing a decent job of using social networks? Were all the websites involved actively updating, providing decent content, responding, providing good offers? Or were they like the majority of companies on social networks and generally doing an appalling job with a half-arsed attempt at updating once a month with some generic PR piece?

How many companies actually have a good integrated Facebook commerce offering? It seems as if Zynga have done pretty well out of Facebook commerce, and they aren’t alone, so why aren’t retailers capitalising? One obvious reason is that having an integrated Facebook shop is still rare enough to be really newsworthy – and although Facebook credits are available at the supermarket checkout, they’re still gaining acceptance as a retail currency. How many people who want to make a purchase will have a credit card available for an Amazon payment, or possibly a Paypal account, but would be slightly irritated by having to go and convert their cash into Facebook currency first? Or are finding that the brands they want to spend with currently just refer them to their traditional website, giving that extra click of delay and potential for a consumer to get distracted, have doubts, or just give up for some reason?

So what are we meant to believe when it comes to social networks?

The easiest answer is to believe your own experience and stats. Particularly if you’re a small company, you’ll want to focus on 1 or 2 places, and spend a decent amount of time using them before you can build up an accurate picture of whether they’re driving traffic or business.Use your gut feeling for what is likely to be a good outlet – you probably won’t be far wrong, and you can find quite a lot of info online to help back up your initial instincts.

For instance, I’d advise Facebook for general B2C traffic, and would suggest Twitter tends to be lower for most consumer sites, but contributes more in spreading information to other locations. Whilst for B2B, LinkedIn shouldn’t be underestimated, and the likes of Scribd, Slideshare etc all come into action.

The other answer could be to speak to someone with experience of similar campaigns for similar specific businesses – if you’re looking for advice on traffic referrals, look for an agency or consultant who can reference the numbers they’ve achieved, and can talk about how they did it, how they measured it, what worked, and importantly, what didn’t.

For instance, Youtube tends to drive very little traffic, unless you approach it in a very specific way and use specific mechanisms to encourage people to visit your site rather than the next related video of skateboarding kittens.

And always question surveys and reports which claim to provide a broad overview of what happens on the internet – the broader the information, the less use it tends to be. Measurement always trumps research – the important thing is to set up the measurement correctly!

Users dissatisfied with social networks – are you surprised?

July 22, 2010 By Dan Thornton

Apparently American consumers surveyed in the 2010 American Customer Survey Index ranked Facebook lower than any other business in its category, but it still managed to beat Myspace by a point. Facebook scored 64 out of 100, Myspace scored 63 out of 100, and by comparison Google scored 80 (A drop of 7 points on last year’s score). (h/t Mashable).

The question is whether anyone is surprised:

a) That social networks can lead to dissatisfaction?

b) That social networks are still growing massively despite such dissatisfaction?

(Note – I’m not picking out any specific network here – I’m talking about everything from a traditional forum to the big social networks).

Firstly, social networks in themselves can be immensely frustrating and problematic – knowing how they work, putting up with them when they crash, receiving messages about problems from an anonymous staff member with no route to reply or dispute are just some of the things which can annoy social network users.

As someone who has used social networks for many years, I’ve become accustomed to the fact that quite often you can try for months to get a response on a business-related issue. Sometimes even when you want to spend some budget with the company in question.

But it’s even worse if you’re a ‘normal’ user – when you signed up to the Terms and Conditions, you agreed your account could be deleted, and unless the media or a prominent tech blogger takes up your case, there’s no real recourse.

Secondly, social networks are fantastic and will continue to grow and attract new users, even amongst those frustrated with them. And it’s all because of a simple selling point – other people. Even if a social network is clunky and frustrating to use, you’ll continue to use it if there’s a critical mass of your friends, family, contacts and information.

Unfortunately Twitter wasn’t included, as so many people encounter it via a 3rd party client. And I didn’t see any mention of LinkedIn. Suffice to say, most of the main social networks do a reasonable job until something goes wrong – then you’re at the mercy of a large company which has scaled quickly to deal with massive demand.

Interestingly, Wikipedia topped the Social Media category with a score of 77. In News and Information, FoxNews.com debuted with a score of 82, which is the highest ever for any news site. There’s a little more info at ForeSee Results.

One potential USP for Diaspora

July 3, 2010 By Dan Thornton

I’ve been following the progress of Diaspora since it started – in the midst of Facebook’s last privacy problems, four young programmers at NYU asked for funding to create ‘a privacy aware, personally-controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network’.

And they got a lot more funding than they asked for – before they’d written a line of code, their Kickstarter page raised over $200,000. And they’d originally set a goal of $10,000. Backers even include Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg!

They’ve just posted their one month update, and things seem to be going well. But in the midst of writing a post on 140char, something struck me.

The big worry about Diaspora is that even if it’s finished, available, and a great service – not enough people will necessarily care enough about privacy etc to sign up and get critical mass to it.

So what about taking a different route.

Advertisers and marketers are increasingly using social networks as a primary route for reaching consumers effectively.

Revenue generation is increasing for the social networks and companies using them.

Customer service and CRM are following along slightly behind.

So why not make the unique selling point to the average user something slightly different – why not make Diaspora the first social network to serve as a platform for Vendor Relationship Management?

With Diaspora, not only could you control all your own data from a privacy point of view, but you could control all your own data from a VRM point of view – selecting what you might want to release to a company, and how long you’ll allow it, whilst it’s relevant.

It could be the social network which doesn’t let you ‘Like’ a company – but lets you control your relationship with all the companies you’d like to do business with. And with the open source and distributed, open approach to data, it could be made easy for consumers and companies to hook up using Diaspora as a platform and channel, rather than having to be within the social network itself.

Maybe that would give both movements more leverage?