by Charlene Li

Google and a slew of partners announced the formation of OpenSocial (URL will be live late Thursday), which Google's Joe Kraus, in a briefing earlier this week with me, described as "a common set of API's for building social applications across multiple sites." There are three specific sets of APIs that tap into 1) member profiles, 2) the social graph, and 3) member activities.

The idea is that developers would have to learn only one set of social app APIs and create apps that will work on any partner's platform. Moreover, the OpenSocial API is written in HTML and javascript (and supports Flash), compared to Facebook's proprietary API. Initial partners in the new API include social networking sites Friendster, hi5, Ning, Orkut, Plaxo, and Viadeo, as well as application companies Oracle and Salesforce.com.

Note that there are some major players not included, namely Facebook and MySpace. Also missing are Microsoft (aligned with Facebook) and Yahoo!, as well as other smaller social networking sites like Bebo and Piczo.

Here's my take on what this announcement means:

* Facebook isn't threatened -- for now. Application developers are going to go to where the heat is, and that heat is red hot at Facebook. They have not only a lead with 6,000 social apps already on their platform, but also close to 50 million users actively using those applications (Hitwise reports that Facebook traffic is 9X the OpenSocial coalition, but this doesn't include international traffic). Add on the third leg of the social app stool -- monetization, which Facebook is set to announce Nov. 6th -- and you have a developer's dream. Any developer worth his/her salt is developing on the Facebook platform, trying to figure what works, what doesn't. And because of this head start, developers will still develop for Facebook FIRST before developing for OpenSocial. It's similar to search engine optimization -- most Webmasters optimize their sites for Google's bots first, and then worry about the other search engines.

However, in the long term, Facebook's ability to dictate how social apps are built will deteriorate under two scenarios. First, closed platforms put a tremendous burden on developers, so the benefit of a vibrant community has to be enough to justify that extra effort. Facebook has tremendous growth and vibrancy, but it will have to sustain that in the face of increased competition. Second, as social applications will spread beyond social networks (see below for more details), Facebook will be less and less able to act as the primary destination for all social application usage. For example, Facebook may still require that the only way someone can read book reviews from friends is on Facebook via the Amazon social app, where as Amazon may be able to show OpenSocial member book reviews on its site.

* OpenSocial gives the partners a fighting chance. Now just because OpenSocial won't displace Facebook in the short term doesn't mean that it's a failure. In fact, it's just the opposite. Without OpenSocial, none of the partners would have had a chance of capturing developer time and attention.

* Developers win big time. Let's say you’re a wannabe social app developer -- you're dancing in the cubicle because you can now get lots and lots of distribution on new sites without expending a huge amount of effort. This is especially important for developers who haven't made it big on Facebook, which is dominated by early movers like Slide and RockYou. Watch for the smartest, most aggressive developers to move over to the OpenSocial platform, eager to create apps that will gain early, viral traction in these new networks.

* Social apps will go beyond social networks. Note that Oracle and Salesforce.com are also partners. They have a strong interest in "socializing" their applications  -- I've written about applications like FaceForce that pull profile data into Salesforce.com. This opens up a whole other space for OpenSocial, namely any Saas or online site that would benefit from social information. Examples would include recruitment sites like Monster.com or CareerBuilder and dating sites like Match.com.

* Things will get interesting when MySpace opens its platform. MySpace announced at Web 2.0 plans to open up its platform, but no details have been forthcoming. If MySpace decides to remain independent and not work with OpenSocial, developers will then have three APIs for social apps to learn,further disadvantaging OpenSocial. But if MySpace is smart and can set aside its competitive impulses, it has more to gain by supporting OpenSocial as a default standard and stranding Facebook all by itself.

* This isn't truly "opening" up social networks. OpenSocial is a set of APIs for developers to create social apps ON platforms that leverage data within each specific platform. One of the biggest complaints about Facebook today is that it's a "walled garden", meaning that all activities that leverage its social graph have to take place on Facebook itself. As I wrote above, imagine the utility of being able to read your friends' reviews in Amazon, or having a social graph of a contact appear in Salesforce.com applications. We're a long, long way from that happening anytime soon.

Lastly, I think OpenSocial will re-energize social networks as they broaden the activities their members can do on their sites. In particular, I'm looking forward to moving beyond the typical fun yet frivolous apps like food throwing developed by 20-something developers. I'm going to closely watch LinkedIn, as collaboration and expertise location applications built on top of its professional business networking social graph will make the site more relevant to me.

I'm interested in your take, especially if you're a developer -- will OpenSocial make a difference in how social apps are created?

Other relevant stories from:
New York Times
TechCrunch
ZDNet
ZDNet's Garet Rodgers on developing apps on Open Social "Google's OpenSocial platform is great!"
Ning backer Marc Andreessen on Open Social

Tags: Facebook, OpenSocial, Google, social apps, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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by Josh Bernoff

We are now within spitting distance of handing in the manuscript of Groundswell to our editors at HBS Press. (Which means about 6 months until you can hold it in your hand.)

With Charlene's encouragement, it is now heavily footnoted (or perhaps more accurately, endnoted). This means when you see anything of interest in the text, we'll let you know how to connect with it online. Stats, articles, blog posts, discussion forums, the whole works. It is after all a book about people on the Internet, why not fill it with links?

The problem with this of course, is that URLs are long and ugly. So in a fit of inspiration, we've replaced nearly all the URLs in the endnotes with tinyurl addresses that will be easy for readers to type in on their on. Neatly solves the digital -> analog -> digital problem that books have.

From poking around a bit I see that tinyurl is blocked in some contexts because sometimes spammers use it to hide their real addresses. We of course, will only send you to interesting sites, some of which are filled with nasty language (it is, after all, real people talking) but none of which are bad for your computer.

So here's my question. Can anybody see a problem with using tinyurl addresses in our book, and if so, what is it? 'Cause if you out there can't find anything wrong with it, it sure looks like a good idea to me. What are the risks?

(Here's a nice David Pogue post on the topic with some interesting comments, and if you click and it doesn't work, tell me, because it's a tinyurl of course.)

Tags: tinyurl, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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by Josh Bernoff

Here's a complete list of the winners and finalists. Clicking on any of the links below for the entries will show you some interesting sites.

Where links aren't live, the site is private or no longer available.

Listening
Winner: Schwab's Money and More Private Community of Gen Xers empowered by Communispace (Schwab and Communispace)
Finalist: Alli Research Communities (GSK Consumer Healthcare and Communispace)
Finalist: Brand Monitoring for Verizon FiOS (Verizon and Umbria)

Talking
Winner: Chevy Aveo Livin' Large Campus Challenge(Chevrolet and Weber Shandwick)
Finalist: USA Cycling Championships Community Toolbar (USA Cycling Championships and Conduit)
Finalist: Dorm Survival Guide Group and Application for Facebook (Target and AKQA)

Energizing
Winner: NetShops Social Merchandising (NetShops and PowerReviews)
Finalist: Fiskateers Scrapbooking community (Fiskars and Brains on Fire)
Finalist: Carnival Connections (Carnival Cruises)

Supporting
Winner: Nike's Jordan Brand Breakfast Club (Nike and Blast Radius)
Finalist: Agile Software Commons (Rally Software)

Embracing
Winner: Salesforce.com Idea Exchange at ideas.salesforce.com (Salesforce.com)
Finalist: South Beach Diet Research Community (Kraft and Communispace)
Finalist: Swisscom Mobile Labs (Optaros and Swisscom Mobile)

Managing
Winner: Avenue A Razorfish wiki
Finalist: ORT Argentina Virtual Campus Project

Social Impact
Winner: "Design Your Portion of the Border Fence" (Brickfish)
Finalist: Zwinky Virtual Live Earth Fundraiser (Zwinky)

Company Transformation
Winner: Dell

Tags: Groundswell awards, Schwab, Communispace, Chevy Aveo, NetShops, PowerReviews, Nike, Blast Radius, salesforce.com, Avenue A Razorfish, Brickfish, Dell, Forrester Research, Groundswell

by Josh Bernoff

Today at the Forrester Consumer Forum we announced the winners of the Forrester Groundswell Awards.

As I mentioned after receiving the entries, there were some fascinating and, more to the point, highly effective social applications in the 78 entries we got. It wasn't easy to pick the best, since there were so many good ones. But, of course, we did. While we used several criteria, the most important was: did the application prove it delivered on business value.

To see the complete list of winners and finalists, click here.

Listening. Schwab's Money and More Community of Gen Xers empowered by Communispace

By Schwab and Communispace

In January 2007, Charles Schwab worked with Communispace to launch their “Money and More” private online community made up of 350 25-to-40 year old Generation X non-Schwab clients. Based on insights from the community, Schwab lowered account minimums to $1,000, introduced Schwab’s high-yield Investor checking account with a high yield, and developing an online landing page specifically for the Gen X target. Schwab has added 32% more Gen Xers YTD when compared to similar timeframes last year.

Talking. Aveo Livin' Large Campus Challenge

by Chevrolet and Weber Shandwick

Chevrolet, along with Weber Shandwick, set out to support the launch of the 2007 redesigned Chevy Aveo with a focus on college students. They created a contest: two students on each of seven college campuses across the nation were selected to see who could "live the largest" inside a Chevy Aveo for five days, only leaving the car for class and 10-minute bio breaks while documenting their entire adventure online. The students embraced the idea enthusiastically, creating YouTube videos, MySpace and Facebook groups, photos, blogs, and other realistic expressions of their experiences. Result: in just five days, the Aveo Livin' Large Campus Challenge generated 217 million audience impressions through online, traditional, grassroots and campus media. Over one million students were actively engaged in the Challenge through the Aveo web site and links in each team's Facebook and MySpace accounts.

Energizing. Netshops Social Merchandising featuring PowerReviews

by NetShops and PowerReviews 

NetShops is a specialty online retailer of home and lifestyle products with 156 separate online storefronts. It launched tag-based customer reviews from PowerReviews in November 2006 on all 156 websites. Within 6 months, the sites featured 19,500 customer reviews and a 26% increase in sales.

Supporting. Nike's Jordan Brand Breakfast Club

by Nike and Blast Radius

Jordan Brand’s Breakfast Club is an interactive online training community. Customers can select pre-built workout curriculums or create their own. The self-built programs incorporate a social component through peer assessments. 120,000 consumers signed up, and when the Training Tool for the Breakfast Club launched in August 2006, 100,000 more unique visitors came to the site than the previous year. Visitors spent an average of 6 minutes on the site.

Embracing.Salesforce.com Idea Exchange at ideas.salesforce.com

by salesforce.com

Salesforce.com built an “ideas market” -- like Digg for customer feedback and product innovation -- that allows members of the community (customers, partners, industry watchers) to submit, vote and comment on new product features. Salesforce.com's Idea Exchange generated 4500 ideas and over 82,000 votes in its first year. Half of salesforce.com's new features now come from suggestions on this idea exchange. Two of the suggestions were also turned into new products by third-party salesforce.com developers within weeks of the being highlighted on the Idea Exchange.

Managing. Avenue A Razorfish wiki

by Avenue A Razorfish

Online development company with 1900 employees developed an internal wiki to run all of its projects and increase efficiency. 987 of the 1900 employees visited the wiki in June. Page views have gone from 6,000 to 27,000 per month in six months, while page edits grew to 25,000 cumulative. There are 6505 pages of content and 2000 blog posts on the wiki. Projects are now faster and people far more responsive and collaborative.

Social impact. "Design Your Portion of the Border Fence"

by Brickfish

Visitors to this site are encouraged to create graphics for a section of the US/Mexico border fence, with the objective of encouraging people to be more thoughtful about this issue. Visitors can review and vote for the entries they like. The site attracted over 1,000 entries, 8,000 reviews, 300,000 views, and lots of press coverage.

Company transformation. Dell.

We created this new category to capture the powerful changes happening across all functions at Dell. The Dell Customer Advocate program, which pursues fast resolution of support problems, decreased the negative share of online comments about Dell by 25%. Direct2Dell, Dell's frank and informative blog, generates 3.5 million page views per month. Ideastorm, Dell's innovation community, tallied 500,000 votes for over 7,000 ideas and generated a new product, Dell PC's with Linux pre-installed. And Employee Storm, an internal idea community, has generated 2,700 ideas and seen visits from 22% of Dell's employees.

Tags: Groundswell awards, Schwab, Communispace, Chevy Aveo, NetShops, PowerReviews, Nike, Blast Radius, salesforce.com, Avenue A Razorfish, Brickfish, Dell, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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by Josh Bernoff

Pop by www.twitter.com/forrester for a live feed from the Forrester event -- including, this morning, Charlene's speech featuring ideas from the book Groundswell.

Regular blogging at blogs.forrester.com/marketing.

Later in this space: winners of the Forrester Groundswell awards.

Gotta fly./josh

By Charlene Li

I was preparing for my Graphing Social Patterns speech on Facebook marketing last night and decided to try out Facebook Flyers, which allows members to create their own little display ads that shows up in the left navigation bar. You can see the ad to the left, and in the ad is a request that people let me know if they saw the ad.

I bought the minimum, 2,500 flyers to run in one day for $5.00 with no targeting at all.

Just now, I received a flood of emails in my Inbox -- at first, I thought I was being spammed until I realized they were all responses to my ad!! The ad ran at 3:26pm PST and I received 67 responses over the course of two minutes. That's a 2.68% response rate. My first responder came from someone in Jordan, the last from a transplanted Nigerian in London. And yes, I'm going to be responding to each and every one of those 67 kind folks who bothered to click on my ad to thank them for their participation.

So this is just one small test that I thought I'd share about advertising on social networking sites. The vast, vast majority of ads that are "run of site" are the typical media buy that you see on many media sites - untargeted, undifferentiated. If you're going to market on social networks like Facebook, then you need to understand that this is a community where communication is paramount. Impersonal ads that shout and don't listen won't work.

If you've had experiences with Facebook Flyers, please share them in the comments below, or email me.

(Also, my presentation from the Graphing Social Patterns conference, "Big Brands & Facebook: Case Studies and Best Practices" is available online at SlideShare.)

Update: Didn't realize it, but I also got two pokes. That ups the response rate to 2.76%.

Tags: Facebook, online advertising, charleneli, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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By Charlene Li

In early July, I published a report entitled “Marketing On Social Networking Sites” which provided details on what types of marketing and advertising work on social networking sites (SNSs) like MySpace and Facebook.

One of the main points I was trying to make was that marketers needed to go beyond simply running ads on SNS and actively engage users. One of the resources I used was a study that MySpace conducted called “Never Ending Friending” (NEF), one of the first studies to look at advertising impact on SNSs.

However, in an effort to simplify a complex study, I inadvertently incorrectly cited the report, creating the possible impression that traditional advertising on SNS doesn’t work. That’s not what I meant, and it’s not what NEF said. I’ve corrected the report, and to clarify, here’s what I should have said.

The study, available here in its entirety, looked at the brand impact of campaigns by adidas and Electronic Arts. When metrics such as intent to purchase and intent to recommend are used, 30% of the value created came from SNS members being reached by traditional display ads and profile views. These SNS ads outperformed results from traditional online ads and were on par with television ads.

One of the key points of the MySpace study – and a thesis for Forrester’s report – is that it’s not enough to look only at the impact of traditional online display advertising, or even simply to look at the number of people reached by a social networking site profile. Instead, there’s the “momentum effect” where SNS members pass along the brand to each other through widgets that they place on their own profiles. According to the MySpace study, that consumer-to-consumer involvement accounts for 70% of the value creation.

I think this is where some of the confusion and my mis-representation of the results came from – that traditional advertising does work but doesn’t create as much value as the “momentum effect” of consumer-to-consumer pass along.

In the end, it’s the combination of the C2C pass along with display advertising that drives the value of marketing on social networking sites. It’s not enough just to look at how many people you reach with a campaign – it’s important to look at the actual brand impact from that initial reach along with the impact of viral pass along. In fact, display advertising helps drive users to company profiles in the first place, helping to kick-start the momentum effect.

As MySpace freely admits, they are still at the beginning of trying to understand, along with the rest of us, the value of SNS marketing – which is why they and other players like Facebook continue to invest in studies that are trying to tease out where value is created. I’ll be following up shortly with new data and research that will hopefully shed more light on this issue.

So I stand by the top line conclusions of the report – that marketers need to get more actively engaged in social networking sites because C2C pass along creates most of the value in SNS marketing. But that doesn’t mean that traditional display advertising doesn’t work – according to the NEF study, it increases key brand metrics and also plays a significant role in driving awareness of company profiles in the SNS.

Tags: MySpace, social networking, online advertising, charleneli, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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by Josh Bernoff

One of the peer reviewers of a draft of our book Groundswell said we hadn't cited enough failures -- hadn't been clear enough about the pitfalls of entering the Groundswell.

Fair enough. I'm asking you for help, now. Bring me your flops. Communities that didn't take off. Companies that blundered in blogging (spare me the Wal-Mart flog, please). Wikis that just lie around. Sites with ratings and reviews that nobody uses.

You can post 'em in comments here or email me at jbernoff at forrester dot c om. The ones that will get into the book -- the best ones:

• Were highly visible.
• Failed for some reason that is, in hindsight, identifiable.
• Can therefore be an object lesson.

If you want to share something personal that you were involved in, even better -- and we can talk about the effort without mentioning your company name.

I'll post a follow-up that describes the patterns in the failures, if we get enough.

Tags: flops, failures, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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