Here’s a great detailed summary of WordCamp 2008 in San Francisco, which is organized by the folks at Automattic, the creators of the best blogging software available, WordPress.
Archive for the 'Community' Category
For those of you who belong to a social network (who doesn’t), you have to watch this hilarious video.
Another conceptual video from the people at Common Craft explaining the idea behind online social networks. If you are having a hard time getting your arms around the idea of social network services or know someone who is, then this video offers a very straight-forward simple explanation of the idea.
Harnessing collective visual intelligence…. Wow!
Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Microsoft Live Labs demonstrates the power of Photosynth:
Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.
John Mahoney over at the DigitalEdge Blog and DigitalEdge TV produced a second show of Practical RSS. I referenced his first show in an earlier post which explained the fundamentals of RSS and its benefits for the average user. The second show teaches how to use Google’s Feed Reader with FireFox and RSS to track news events. John also demonstrates how to create custom news feeds on specific topics.
John Battelle referenced this video on SearchBlog. It explains where the Web has been and where it is going…
This month’s SF Tech Sessions features three startups that are building communities on the mobile platform. The companies are:
1. WAPtags is a mobile search and bookmarking site that is building an ad-hoc community around search results. Users can leave comments on sites, creating conversations and connections between visitors who found the site through WAPtags.
2. Twitter is built to let you take an online community - your friends, blog readers, or site visitors - and make a mobile community around them. Users can send SMS updates to Twitter which are saved online and can be posted to website or sent to friends’ phones.
3. TextMarks allows people to create instantaneous mobile communities based solely on text messages. Anyone can define a key word and choose an automated response when that keyword is sent to the system. But a community is created when users allow people to subscribe to the key word, then any subscriber to send messages to the group allowing anyone with a keyword, whether they know each other or not, to join in.
It strikes me that potential in mobile communities for retailers is huge and it’s worth watching this area as it continues to grow.
Here is an interesting use of customer/community feedback.
The Flyers, a minor league baseball team in Schaumburg, IL, allow the fans, voting online, to decide the team’s starting lineup each night. The fans determine the lineup, the pitcher, and who will play what position.
Now take this idea a few steps further and imagine what retailers and manufacturers could do if they had direct access to their customers during product development, allowing them to build the products with the features and options most desired.
A press release from Hitwise shows the trend that community sites such as MySpace are increasingly driving more traffic to shopping sites and retailers. The report details MySpace.com’s phenomenal growth over the past six months increasing 67% to a 4.88% market share of all U.S. visits to websites.
But what was even more striking about the report was MySpace.com’s impact on upstream visits to shopping sites:
Social networking site MySpace.com accounted for 2.53 percent of all U.S. upstream visits to Shopping and Classifieds category for the week ending August 26, 2006, up from 1.28 percent six months ago (week ending February 25, 2006).
Compare Myspace.com’s upstream visits (2.53%) to the big three search engines, Google (14.93%), Yahoo! Search (4.69%), and MSN Search (2.33%) and it’s obvious that online communities have the potential to be just as important to retailers as search technologies in driving traffic.
Here’s another example of retailers using their customers/community to power their sales:
It’s all about a community and what experiences its members have to share with each other. Bazaarvoice is taking advantage of this philosophy by launching yet another another service, SyndicateVoice™, which will share customer ratings and reviews across many of the shopping portals and comparison sites, where most people start their shopping experiences.
SyndicateVoice is seamlessly integrated with Bazaarvoice’s ratings and reviews platform to allow retailers to maximize marketing impact and conversion rates. Bazaarvoice provides the industry’s most advanced analytics to allow companies to pinpoint product trends, community sentiment, and key influencers based on review activity. The Bazaarvoice solution is totally customizable and integrates with leading eCommerce tools including web analytics, site search, and email marketing services.
Bazaarvoice manages a customer ratings and review service which allows businesses to enable and analyze customer ratings and reviews on their website.